Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia: The Social Production of Civic Spaces

Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia presents a detailed examination of the underlying issues of urban life in the Far East.

Leading authorities on globalization and politics in the region cover key themes of continuity and change:

• relationships between civil society and the production of urban spaces. Chapters focus on various types of ’civic spaces’ that provide spaces for life that are autonomous from state and capital
• ten case studies explore a wide variety of contexts ranging from spaces where lower classes congregated in ancient Chinese cities to cyberspaces of the contemporary internet
• the history and role of civil society in social and political philosophies of societies in the Pacific Asia region
• tendencies and issues related to specific types of civic spaces in a given city. Several studies find that great stress has been placed on long-standing community and civic spaces
• common themes, patterns and issues as well as singularities of each particular context. In this way it can contribute to the broader (mostly Western) literature on society and space
• the future of cities in Pacific Asia from the perspective of civic space. Can civic spaces be routinely created rather than appropriated through civil society-state-economy struggles?

Most research on globalization and civil society has focused on the West, this unique book brings together a tight analysis and a series of ten case studies on Pacific Asian countries. It also theorizes and empirically explores the relationships between civil society and the production of urban spaces.

Mike Douglass is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the Director of the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawaii, USA.

K.C. Ho is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore.

Giok Ling Ooi is Professor at the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is also Adjunct Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies.