Visionary cities or spaces of uncertainty? Satellite cities and new towns in emerging economies

Abstract

Satellite cities and new towns have recently captured urban imaginations of planners, property developers and politicians in the Global South and East, and are also emerging as a research topic in urban studies, planning and development studies. With emblematic names like Techno City, Eco City and Hope City they embody a new property investment frontier and an optimistic belief in economic growth driven by a rising middle class. This special issue critically explores the various manifestations anddimensions of satellite city andnew towndevelopment in emerging economies. These cities characterize contemporary processes of urban development. Planned on greenfield sites some distance away from the existent city and the problems associated with rapid urbanization, they provide planners and developers with the opportunity to develop semi-autonomous cities based on visionary urban designs. As status projects they represent a nationalist ideal and new belief in city-planning, often reflecting formsof social engineering andahistorical belief in the ability toplan for entire societies and economies. They intend to connect people, regions and sectors to the global economy, relying on branding strategies in order to attract foreign investors and to compete with other such cities elsewhere. Satellite cities and new towns are developed in settings of rapid economic and political transformation in ways that expose the limits to urban design. Their reliance on global circuits of capital and capital injections by international financial institutions such as the World Bank, marks their vulnerability to global economic conjunctures, in turn compromising their provision of privatized infrastructure and centralized master planning. Ordinary city development and its informal aspects infringe on these cities, acting as constant reminders of their problematic scope and ambition. As social and economic enclaves, they constitute sites of spatial exclusion that privilege certain types of economic activities and middle class demands. The tension between satellite cities and new towns as planned rationalities and sites of speculative urbanism on the one hand and cities as living organisms and sites of creative reworking and social differentiation on the other, marks them as nascent spaces in which a multiplicity of development trajectories and organizational rationalities converge. In recognition of the gap between planning and lived realities of the built environment and testimony to the globalized nature of expert networks, planners and officials employ contemporary discourses of inclusiveness and sustainable urbanism. The translation of contemporary planning, policy and/or management concepts such as sustainable urban planning, risk management, renewable energy, and public participation mark these cities as unique research sites where planning