Urban Geography

Gender, Cities and Culture

Three years ago I started working on the radically transformed morphology of the East Asia metropolises in response to capital globalization in the last two decades calls for rigorous analysis. Contemporary literature on the global city, with its major emphasis on Western global cities, is inadequate to theorize the cultural, economic, and political changes seen in such cities as Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. This three-year project therefore seeks to reframe the global city by analyzing the cultural politics of global city-regions and linked cities in East Asia. I engage with the following questions: what do linked cities mean against the backdrop of the circulation and drift of transnational capital? How do we understand the idea of “the twin-city” in relation to the global city-regions? To what extent are global cities or global city-regions the quintessential transnational space of our time? How do we address questions of citizenship in global city-regions? I argue that to investigate urban phenomenon of linked cities in the context of globalization, we need to attend to not only the function and images of the global city but also the operating logic of the global city-regions. Employing East Asia global cities as my case studies, I illustrate some of the most established theories of city-links, such as the hypothesis of “the cultural other” (in Leo Lee Ou-fan’s words) or the idea of cosmopolitanism (Ackbar Abbas on Hong Kong and Shanghai), have to be postulated in the context of the global city and global city-regions to be effective analytical terminology.

My current 3-year project focuses on the articulation of transnational flows of people. While the privileged professional managerial class takes center stage, the migratory flows of the underclass are often hidden from sight, left without resources for self-articulation. In view of the discursive absence of cultural representations and official recognition of the global underclass, I attempt to explore, with a critical geographic perspective, one of the most significant aspects of the emergent cultures of East Asian globalization, the migration of underprivileged people and their lived space of everyday life in a few cultural texts. The first year analyzes contemporary Hong Kong’s cinematic representations of the migration of the underclass, including prostitutes, foreign domestic workers, illegal immigrants and new immigrants, to explore how tensions resulting from capital and people flows are cast in stereotypical differences between Hong Kong and China. The second year looks at the representations of transmigrants in Taiwan’s recent documentary films with a particular emphasis on the aborigines, new immigrants, foreign workers, and low-skilled workers. I intend to investigate the complicated relationship between the camera’s gaze at the underclass and Taiwan’s self-articulation in the context of mega-urbanization. The last year focuses on the images and narratives of rural migrants in several Chinese films produced after the 1990s. Central to the project are the possibilities and limitations of representing rural migrants’ experiences of disembeddedness and the impact of uneven geographical developments on the concrete space of migrant workers’ everyday life.