Frangville, V., P. Petit & L. Richaud (2020) Public spaces in Socialist East Asia : Introduction (original) (raw)

Call for Papers: Civilisations 2020. Public space in East Asia. Visuality, performativity and interactions in socialist contexts. Deadline: 30 September 2019.

Civilisations, 2020

Few studies in the social sciences have explored the complex and entangled transformations of public spaces in the varied socialist contexts of East Asia (limited in this issue to China, Vietnam and Laos). As the revolutionary socialist project was altered by the emergence of State-controlled capitalism and a consumer society partially opened to global flows from the 1980s onward, practices and imaginaries developed around public spaces have been deeply impacted. Motorised mobility, for instance, has become accessible to most citizens and dramatically changed traffic practices (Qian 2015); the development of real-estate projects radically transformed the urban fabric (Harms 2016); new forms of consumption by emerging middle-classes and increasingly autonomous youths triggered the creation of new spaces to adapt to new expectations; processes of patrimonialisation have created new symbolic maps; hybrid publics have emerged through migrations as well as domestic and international tourism; political and police scrutiny are increasingly supported by new surveillance technologies; and the Internet has created a virtual space that duplicates and influences interactions and usages in physical spaces. Scholars working on public spaces in East Asian socialist contexts often limit their research to one specific country or area (Gaubatz 2019; Gibert 2014; Kim 2015; J. Qian 2018; Kurfürst 2012). This special issue, by contrast, offers an original crosscutting perspective on societies that share many similarities (McGee 2009). Contributors will discuss the transformations of public spaces while remaining alert to their physical, visual and interactional features.

Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong

Urban Studies, 2002

This paper explores the relationship between public space and cultural politics in Hong Kong. There is a tendency to assert that public space is disappearing in the city, whether through overt control of the public sphere or the commodification of landscape. While similar views have been expressed in relation to many cities around the world, in Hong Kong these concerns are difficult to disentangle from post-colonial politics. This paper therefore situates anxieties about public space within an historical geography of the Central district. This contextual strategy is deployed to frame a contemporary case study of the imaged powerful and powerless in the city: Hong Kong Land, Central leading landlord and Filipino domestic workers who gather in Central on Sundays to enjoy their day off. It is suggested that this gathering and the political rallies it hosts disrupt normative understandings of public space by introducing a transnational element that helps us to see Hong Kong's public...

A taste of 'modernity': Working in a western restaurant in market socialist China

Ethnography, 2005

What does working in a western restaurant mean to people in urban China? This article, based on ethnographic research at three western food places in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, argues that for Harbiners at the turn of the century, working in western restaurants was meaningful for two reasons. First, these workplaces were seen as connected to the global capitalist economy and the world of cosmopolitan consumerism, in contrast to the local, provincial, and backward. Second, these workplaces were seen as distinct, and indeed oppositional, to state socialist workplaces and to the socialist understanding of work where individual contribution was rewarded by state paternalism. People who worked in western food restaurants understood work through the concept of development – people should develop themselves by acquiring skills and experiences through work. In other words, for those who worked in western food places, jobs were something to be ‘consumed’ like courses in a self-designed training program for entrepreneurship.