Editorial: archiving Asian cities amidst time in motion

Abstract

The city, as a mediated, spontaneous, and evolving entity, relives and replicates itself through its own structures and codes. This is so because the city continuously regenerates multiple forms of embodied acts and gestures—which, as they reconstitute themselves, transmit and record collective memories, knowledge, trauma, and stories. As an amalgamation of numerous gestures, the city becomes a mesmerizing theater that resides on the cusp of fiction and reality. Its disparate constituents of the city—architectures, edifices, streets, alleys, people and their stories—have power to “turn the city into an immense memory where many poetics proliferate” (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998, 170). Archiving Asian cities amidst time in motion is a special issue project that explores modalities of remembering and recording the highly developed urban locales of the so-called Asian Tigers: Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Hsinchu, and Yuanlin. These places still hover around the remnants of colonization, Cold War structures, and varied aftermaths of rapid industrialization. Between the 1960s and 1990s, the economies of South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have experienced rapid industrial development and by the early 2000s, these countries have developed into high-income economies. Rather than looking at these locations primarily through the lens of monetary growth, as leading international financial centers or model sites of technological innovation, this project aims to explore happenings on the other side of the city surface, possibly hidden or distorted beneath the glory of accelerated economic transition. In ways varying yet similar, the urban centers of these hyper-developed Asian Tigers have not only undergone massive alterations; they have evolved through constant deconstructions followed by reconstructions. The early period of urbanization of South Korea during the 1960s and1970s, for example, can be characterized as a series of vicious destructions of anything old. Only recently has the process of urban development in Seoul began to reclaim or excavate the value of traditional culture. Nonetheless, the current drive to “rehabilitate national heritage” may merely foment the formation of State-driven nationalist projects. It may even simply promote gentrification or commercialized tourist venues instead of encouraging the truly spontaneous, organic revival of civic communities. Viewed from this perspective, urban developments in these Asian cities over the past few decades have once again altered them, on a scale comparable to that of colonial occupation and even war. As most of the residents in these locales dwell simultaneously in various temporal states and unresolved moments in history, one of the aims of this project is to allow one to see how these urban spaces reactivate the past and produce the new “real” in our present. By and large, contributors to this special issue agree that “our perception of the past is determined by the present [; that is,] the manner in which the past is perceived is not solely dependent upon the available information about the past, but is also influenced by the interpretation of that information by the contemporary individual or society” (Stone 2020, 33). Articles covering six Asian cities consider births, metamorphoses, ramifications, and fluctuating social meanings of the given urban sites that not only recall the past but also recognize its continuous re-employment. This project reveals how the “city as archive” embodies memories of the given city itself, as well as history conveyed via architecture, city squares, island/landscapes, literature, heritage sites, and alleys. Our works share “a conception