Constructing Asia

In 2015, a landslide devastated the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The slide destroyed 33 buildings, ruptured a 400 m section of gas pipeline and left approximately 80 people dead or missing. The debris covered an area of around 10 hectares. The source of disaster was an unstable, 20-storey mountain of construction waste. The detritus from the city’s building frenzy of the last 30 years had become a geologically significant mass capable of decimating a part of the city (How a Hill of Dirt and Debris Became a Landslide 2015).

From Singapore to Mumbai, and Phnom Penh to Beijing, intensive construction is not only reshaping city environments, but also redefining their economies, politics, and social lives. Concrete, sand, heavy construction equipment, and hard-hatted labourers evoke a specific ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977) that is reflected in everyday life across Asia. These workers, companies, materials, and capital are deeply implicated in state institutions, national and regional economies and emerging regional political dynamics.

Construction is fundamental to Asia’s economy. Industry statistics project that construction spending will grow from 36% of the global market in 2005 to 46% in 2020. In the three years between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement than the US did during the whole of the 20th century (How China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century 2015). In India, the construction industry is a major contributor towards the GDP, employing 33 million people and impacting 250 associated industries such as cement, coal, and technology (India’s construction sector to boom 2016). The construction industry in Singapore employs 326,000 foreign construction workers from across Asia, accounting for about a third of the one million work permit holders engaged in manual labour in the city-state of five and a half million inhabitants. Booming real estate markets in Ho Chi Minh City, Yangon, and Phnom Penh, have resulted in massive evictions and expanding concerns over land grabbing (Nam 2011; Harms 2013, 2016). Whether it is the Japanese ‘construction state’ (McCormack 1995; see also Moore 2013), China’s ‘ghost cities’ (Shepard 2015) or Thailand’s ‘ruins of progress’ (Johnson 2014), construction-related industries and their failures have been fundamental forces behind the imaginary and ruptures of the so-called ‘Asian century’ (Mahbubani 2008; Roy and Ong 2011; Gillen 2014).

Scholars have shown how urbanization is rapidly transforming Asia as a region and repositioning its cities as critical spaces for 21st century urban theory (Jones and Douglass 2008; Ong and Roy 2011; Goh, Bunnel, and Van Der Veer 2015). Yet, construction has been curiously absent from many discussions of urbanism and remains relatively opaque as an industry. This is surprising given the centrality of the industry to the region’s post-war reconstruction and its Cold War economies (e.g. Chaleomtriana 2007). The nine papers in Constructing Asia aim to address this gap. We ask: how does construction shape the social, economic and political processes through which Asian cities come into being? We suggest that the intense flows of construction materials, capital, labour and their lingering after effects offer critical insights into contemporary urban economies and politics. We show how the arrangements of power and precarity, capital and labour and citizens and non-citizens that materialize on the construction site produce the city. If, as Brenner (2014) posits, planetary urbanism calls for an urban theory ‘without an outside,’ then closer engagement with construction offers a critical point of entry into the fractal socio-material landscapes produced in the process of assembling urban spaces. In the zone of the construction site, land becomes property, disparate spaces coalesce in flows of people and things and networks of power and capital converge. As this collection shows, construction is constitutive of the new material arrangements, economies, and political ruptures that define Asian cities. The recent turn towards infrastructures in the critical social sciences (Starr 1999; Graham and Marvin 2001; Graham and Thrift 2007; Anand 2011; Larkin 2013; Von Schnitzler 2013; Simone 2015) has drawn us nearer to construction, and the political, financial and material processes that structure them.

Our contributions take construction and construction sites as a starting point to interrogate urban Asia in theory, practice, and imagination. Instead of investigating construction as a technical process, we explore it as a space of intense material, social, and political action. In these sites, diverse sets of actors interact, clash and come together. By asking how construction mobilizes critical actors in the name of urban alternatives and galvanizes publics, this collection re-visits important debates in critical urban studies from a new perspective. Drawing on illustrations from Cambodia, China, India, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and Pakistan, we show how construction sites—understood as dispersed and partially enclosed enclaves of building—are fundamental to contemporary political economic formations. Taking the construction industry as a lynchpin in Asia’s economies as well as its material and environmental transformations, our contributions join scholarly conversations in urban studies, anthropology, and geography. We follow three lines of enquiry: construction materials, construction economies, and construction politics.

Construction materials

Construction materials like concrete, paint, sand and waste that produce urban infrastructures reshape physical terrain—land, sea, air—and the political itself.¹ In this collection, we explore how things function as a critical node of construction assemblages (McFarlane 2011). We trace how materials assemble alongside human actors— mediating economies, distributing power, and producing political effects (Latour 2005; Bennett 2010). We show how things link actors to each other in built forms and how materials mediate political struggles, serving as important points of urban resistance.

The cases described by Elinoff and Sur demonstrate how concrete and paint, respectively, function as means of gathering capital and extending political power via urban projects. Concrete, in the Thai case, is both a material mechanism of distributing power through infrastructure projects and a means for citizens to read the limitations of such political networks. Although the material enables power to move through specific and situated groups of people by extending capital across time and space, it also becomes a medium of resistance. Indeed, as Elinoff shows, the same material properties that allow concrete and cement to distribute power are also the modes through which its failure becomes evident; volume, failure and obduracy enable critical political engagements where power remains occluded. Sur argues that colour gathers momentum as a political force in Kolkata, showing how the city’s official blue colours create new political constituencies, extending capital through construction and producing new political allegiances via maintenance. Kolkata’s politicians hope that as the city turns blue, so too might its citizens in their political leanings. Through infrastructural investments in slums and corporate ‘blue sky’ aspirational projects, blue has become the chromatic axis upon which the present government creates new constituencies and exclusions.

In his description of airflows in Singapore, Josh Comaroff illuminates how the manipulation and control of tropical air has been fundamental to the design of many of the city’s buildings. Yet, his argument goes beyond merely pointing out how particular histories have become embedded in the city’s architecture. Instead, he shows how thermal comfort links the city’s physical forms with its political terrain. As he advances, ‘the muscular presence of air’ was omnipresent as Singaporean state-leaders re-crafted the built environment to usher in modernity and to ward off crisis. Waqas Butt’s analysis of construction waste in Lahore demonstrates how a proliferation of construction projects generates a parallel economy of waste and demolition. He advances that waste is not inert, but productive. Construction waste provides labourers with livelihood options, while also finding its way into their lungs and bodies. Materiality thus sits at the boundary between value and waste, monumentality and rubble (see Gordillo 2014; Harms 2016). These multidirectional possibilities raise questions about the way materials mediate politics (Braun and Whatmore 2010) and the fragility of power as it is given form in the built environment (Connolly 2013).

Construction economies

Contemporary Asian economies are deeply tied to construction. Henri Lefebvre may have anticipated this in his notion of the urban revolution. Mapping the transformation from industrial to urban society, Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) argued that urban space itself would become a critical mode of accumulation. In his classic work, The Urbanization of Capital, David Harvey builds on Lefebvre’s insights to describe how at different times and in different ways, urbanization has served as a ‘spatial fix’ to capitalist crises of accumulation. Harvey argues that not only does the built environment become the space to resolve periodic problems related to over-accumulation, but that the solution to over-accumulation manifests itself in fixed capital forms like buildings and infrastructure (Harvey 1985). Although the specificities of these economic outcomes vary across different economic periods—suburbanization vs. contemporary urbanization—we note how construction, that is the process of building, is a critical channel through which capitalism reinvigorates itself. Indeed, capital accumulation and urbanization are so closely associated that construction booms often precede economic crises (1985, 19–23). Harvey has documented the way ‘surplus absorption through urbanization’ has been critical to stabilizing and driving the global economy across multiple recent crises in different geographic spaces (2008, 29). Here, construction not only appears as an important site of empirical investigation but the driver of the contemporary economy, in which building, real estate, and finance converge to resolve the deepening crisis of accumulation (Harvey 2008, 25). Such a formulation, he points out, has not only resulted in expansive urban growth, but also repositioned the city at the centre of contemporary political struggles.

Harvey’s argument about the effects of surplus are particularly evident in the way booming property markets in Asia are remaking city spaces. As Sylvia Nam’s paper shows, Phnom Penh’s ‘vertical turn’ emerges out of a particular economic formulation that draws land speculation, real estate development, and construction together into the built form of soaring high-rise towers. As she advances, skyscrapers—finished and unfinished, occupied and unoccupied—do not demonstrate ‘Asian modernity’ as they are often taken to, but instead reflect ‘the shape of price.’ Asia’s feverish cycles of property booms and busts, real estate schemes, and infrastructure projects are evidence that capital has found new ways to circulate in the 21st century leaving a specific footprint on how cities look and feel.² In construction spaces, real estate development, property speculation, architectural and engineering expertise, and physical labour all intersect with broader financial processes to produce the city (see Douglass and Huang 2010; Nam 2011; Harms 2012, 2013, 2016). Although high-rise condominiums emerge with the promises of new modern subjectivities, Nam shows us that they are better understood as liveable figurations of value.

The centrality of the construction-real estate-finance nexus is evident in vacant housing estates and high rises, as states and private investors find ever more ways to ‘freeze’ capital in the built form of the city. Brenner and Schmid (2015) have argued that this dynamic is fundamental to understanding the relationship between concentrated and distributed urbanization that drives what they call ‘planetary urbanism.’ If Nam’s argument shows us how capital emerges in the form of ‘living spaces,’ George Jose’s contribution to the collection adeptly demonstrates how the air itself becomes sellable in the construction economy. In describing Mumbai’s ‘airscape’ he shows how such space was produced as commodity via tradable instruments and emerging discourses of housing rights. Originally developed to ensure the construction of low cost housing, Transferable Development Rights (TDR), paired with density calculations, were used to drive developments vertically, while exerting equal pressure downwards on poor urbanites who were moved out of the city into substandard buildings in the urban periphery. As Jose demonstrates, the financialization of urban air space has had the effect of producing a new topography for capital development, transforming the city skyline and the lives of its residents in unequal measures.

The cumulative weight of the construction sector is itself a demonstration of what Michael Peter Smith has famously described as ‘transnational urbanism.’ Smith (2001) calls attention to transnational urbanism as sociocultural and political processes by which social actors forge connections between localities across national borders in ways that sustain new modes of politics, economics, and culture. Indeed, the convergence of transnational capital and labour in the space of construction echoes precisely this insight. However, as Ong (2007) and Yeoh (1999) remind us, construction sites are also intensely nationalized spaces. The intertwining of opportunity, economic precarity, and regional inequalities enables workers to leverage their bodies and beings in the name of better lives; it also allows states to import new low-cost workers for labour-intensive megaprojects via booming construction economies.

Yeoh, Baey, Platt, and Wee’s contribution demonstrates how the lives of foreign construction workers in Singapore sit precisely between tensions that define the transnational and national. Their mobility is predicated on Singapore's leveraging of the inequalities in the global labour force as a means of importing sufficient workers to keep up with the rapid pace of construction. Ironically, the flows of transnational labour across nation-states render workers immobile in low-status work in Singapore’s nationalized labour regulation system. As the authors show, many so-called mobile workers find themselves stuck between the possibilities opened up through construction-based transnational labour migration on the one hand, and the stasis inherent in the regulation of transnational labouring bodies once they become grounded in nationalized spaces, on the other. Construction figures prominently here both as a driver and a point of blockage for these (im)mobile subjects.

Construction politics

Finally, this collection invites new discussions on the relationship between construction and political mobilization. Illustrations from Beijing and Hanoi show how construction’s spatial and temporal qualities enable new forms of political struggle even in places where direct modes of political engagement are circumscribed, if not strictly forbidden. Nguyen’s paper takes us to the heart of Beijing where the booming property market that incentivizes developers to aggregate land quickly also enables residents to stretch time in order to slow, impede, and stall construction. These conflicting temporal frames—between the time of development and the time of living—can give residents the upper-hand allowing them to exert their will on the fast changing cityscape through slow action. ‘Site fights’ as she calls them, show how citizens struggle in innovative ways against construction by bringing projects to a halt. This is an effective strategy in a city where more overt political mobilization is difficult. Paradoxically, construction, which is often cast as something that obliterates the political, is precisely the spark that ignites these struggles.

Karis’s description of the land aggregation process in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, emphasizes the centrality of space. He shows how merely staying put enacts what he calls ‘a politics of presence.’ Like Nguyen’s ‘site fights,’ Karis shows how residents of Hanoi’s urban periphery leverage their spatial presence to oppose the construction of a new railway system. Both papers show how citizens turn the building process against itself. Using temporal and spatial strategies to intervene, contest, and disrupt projects shaping their worlds. These studies reveal how understanding the forces that drive and govern construction opens up new political possibilities, tactics and strategies for resisting projects.

Conclusion

Although Asia has been a particularly fertile ground for thinking about urbanization, we suggest that engaging more closely with construction materials, economies, and politics offers insights into how the construction site itself is a critical ‘new geography of urban theory’ (Roy 2009; Roy and Ong 2011). Recent debates surrounding questions of gentrification (Schafran 2014; Ghertner 2015; Madden 2015), planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid 2011, 2015; see also Walker 2015), the politics of infrastructure (Simone 2015) and assemblage and critical urban theory (Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011; McFarlane 2011) find explicit grounding in construction sites. This collection demonstrates how materials that build infrastructure create fragile networks of power and capital and illuminate the mechanisms through which construction gain legitimacy under the banner of gentrification even as it is contested. Rethinking construction sites and processes allows us to bridge the apparent gap between what McFarlane and others call assemblage (2011) and what Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth (2011) call critical urbanism. McFarlane’s work highlights the value of thick description and attention to the socio-materiality of the city. Indeed ethnographic attention to construction helps us to understand and trace the vast networks of human and non-human things that converge as cities come into being. We suggest that materials, capital, knowledge, financial instruments, waste and labouring bodies are all fundamental to the making of urban space and politics. Yet, they also show that to interrogate spaces of urban assembly is to be in close proximity to both capitalism and state power (i.e. Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011, 230). Beyond illuminating the structural roots of emergent assemblages, the papers in this special issue advance how the political and economic arrangements that animate socio-material networks within construction sites also drive the specific modalities, strategies, and tactics essential to the reproduction of inequality in the city. Moreover, these same structures are critical to shaping the form and content of emerging struggles waged over the right to the city. In this way, our interrogation of construction in Asia does not merely mediate two faces of urban politics, but seeks to create space for grounded theory-building that can help re-situate critical urban studies more broadly.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is based on a conference entitled ‘Constructing Asia: Materiality, Capital, and Labour in the Making of an Urbanizing Landscape’ jointly organized by Asian Migration and Asian Urbanisms Clusters, Asia Research Institute, and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Cities Cluster at the National University of Singapore. The authors would like to thank Nasser Abourahme, Tim Bunnell, Kong Chong Ho, Abidin Kusno, Valerie Yeo, and the anonymous reviewers at CITY for their guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by Singapore Ministry of Education AcRF Tier 1 grant and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (FY 2015-FRC2-019).

Notes on contributors

Eli Elinoff

Dr. Eli Elinoff is a lecturer of Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. Email: [email protected]

Malini Sur

Dr. Malini Sur is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society and teaches anthropology at Western Sydney University. Email: [email protected].

Brenda S. A. Yeoh

Professor Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair) in the Department of Geography and Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Josh Comaroff’s analysis of the flows of sand from Cambodia to Singapore reflects a transboundary version of this same process: http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/39/built-on-sand-singapore-and-the-new-state-of-risk

2 Harvey suggests that Asia’s construction sector became a critical engine driving the global economy during the 2007 economic crisis. http://www.cccb.org/en/multimedia/videos/culture-and-cities-the-challenge-of-tourism/225261