Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia by Rita Padawangi

Author:Rita Padawangi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Modernization as state-craft and as moral admonition

The will to order is a central feature of modernity (Bauman 1991) and central to modernist urban planning and architecture. The modernist architect Le Corbusier famously declared: “To create architecture is to put into order” (Le Corbusier, quoted in Till 2009: 31). Urban planning and architecture has had a central role in modernization projects in many nations around the world. They have served as effective tools for the state to shape the city’s physical structure and to transform the society in the name of social betterment and progress (Scott 1998). Modernist utopian urban projects such as that of Chandigarh, Brazilia or Dhaka, assume that the formal structure of modernist architecture and planning can transform society, its political structure and people’s way of life in accordance with the universal principles of enlightened modernity (Ong 2011: 213). Images of modernity represent both aesthetics and a moral admonition, a “modernist ethic” (Garrido 2013: 167). In the modernization project, urban forms are endowed with a pedagogic (Söderström 2014: 149) and disciplining role to establish order and prevent disorders.

As the will to order stems from the fear of disorder, the ordering project is inherently exclusionary (Bauman 1991). The modern state propagated some patterns and set to eliminate others. Ordering involves at times brutal processes of selection: everything that does not fit in needs to be eliminated. Still, the ordering’s rhetoric is powerful, as its promise of a better urban future is inspirational for the majority of urban dwellers, even those who will not benefit directly from the development (Harms 2012; Leaf 2015).

In contemporary cities in the Global South, the rhetoric of modernization and “modern ethic” continues to be the driving force behind state projects that aim to foster a new way of living and a new use of urban spaces. At the same time, modernization projects provide the citizens with new means of being city dwellers and creating their own versions of being in the global world (Garrido 2013; Söderström 2014: 150; Leaf 2015). In many cities in the Global South, modernist ethics form an ideological continuity in the age of globalization (Garrido 2013), particularly when many emergent economies in the South, especially those in Asia, have increasingly become reference points for modernity among politicians, planners and residents (Roy 2011; Söderström 2014: 148).

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