In this week’s reading, Glaser started with his experience of living in New York in his childhood. He mentioned the changes of New York happened during this decades, and argued about the advantages and functions of urban cities. As a person grown in Beijing, I agree that urban cities are places that could provide people with all kinds of entertainment and create big ideas. Being used to surrounded by all those cultural and entertaining resources, I could hardly imagine the life in non-metropolis. For most of the time, we think it is natural for a person from a less developed city strive to move to metropolis, but it is always surprising when we heard someone from a big city choose to live in a suburban area. Also, I think the author’s idea about the relationship between environmentalism and city construction is very interesting. By saying that “we must discard the view that environmentalism means living around trees and that urbanites should always fight to preserve city’s past”, the author indicates constructing tall buildings might be conducive to city environment, and make city life affordable to more people. It’s hard for me to agree that building edifices could help to protect the environment, because I believe the more people the city promises to contain, the less likely the environment would be protected. Nonetheless, I do concede that the behavior of protecting city past is to a large extent a barrier put up to resist he flow of population from other areas. It would be interesting to see constructing tall buildings as a population running mechanism, especially when we take a look at Beijing, a city which has its heartland full of low buildings and palaces, symbolizing authority and power.
Here is an image that shows the layout of the heartland of Beijing.
Anna Roy talks about the process of worlding. In her opinion, the previous political economy and postcolonial frameworks are not sufficient to describe and explain the development of different global metropolitans. The author’s main point is that the postcolonial theory studying urban cities has to concerned the theoretical positions of geographies of knowledge and articulation of subject-power. Through reading the text, I feel I could strongly resonate with what the author called “homegrown” modernity. Although we tend to think that the process of globalization is driven by the intention of expansion of the western countries, it is undeniable that in many cases, the idea of urbanism is not learnt from the west directly, but rather borrowed from the metropolitans that shared similar culture values and cultural background. “They are, in this sense, provincial as much as they are global” (Roy & Ong, 2011, p.311). It is true that in Asia, there is a chronological order of stepping in modernity. Cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo learned modernity from the west, and then provided examples for other Asian cities to mirror. When acquiring the sense of modernity from Tokyo and Hong Kong, what Asian cities learnt were indigenized urbanism. A great example I can think of is Taiwan. Because of historical reason, Taiwan was governed by Japan for over 50 years. As a result, Japanese culture permeated the whole Taiwan society and strongly affected the modernization process of Taiwan. Wandering in Taipei (one of the most important urban cities in Asia) now, one will feel so much like roaming the streets in Tokyo. As a person who had been to Japan before went to Taiwan, the urban appearance of Taipei almost reminded me of the nostalgic moments of my trip to Japan. Thus, I would agree that the globalization process in different cities varied a lot, and it is impossible to use an universal idea of globalization to indicate all those processes without taking geoplotical knowledge into account.
Here are street photo of Taipei.
Here ares street photos of Tokyo.
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