Sitting on the dock of the bay: partial views of change - Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong

摘要

Cities embody the political projects of elites; the spaces that are made frame the lives of their inhabitants; it is within these spaces that ordinary people make their lives. Cities seem dense, resistant and hard but they are always in flux; their transience marks their elites' responses to the shifting demands/opportunities of changing circumstances; change has its benefits and its costs; these are not borne equally; all these matters can be accessed in many ways, here the route is though the accumulation of ethnographic detail; partial recollection; cities illuminated through the small scale; it is the way in which we all grasp the cities in which we live.