Studying from ‘The Other’ side of the world

For my year abroad, I decided that I wanted to study Geography at the National University of Singapore. The main factors in this decision were that it was geographically a long way away from the UK, allowing me to explore new regions of the world, and that it is a highly regarded university worldwide with a very strong Geography department. I knew that the teaching would be different here, but because of Singapore’s reputation for  being a fairly Westernized state, I thought that ultimately there would not be too much of a difference between the Geography taught in the UK and the Geography taught in Singapore.

I was wrong. I have found that much of what I have been learning and reading about has been a critical reflection of the perspectives I have developed in the first two years of my studies. This is not to say that my studies so far have been without critical reflection.  Now, however, I am living and studying in a region that, until recently, had largely been ignored in academic literature and I have noticed that there is a much larger emphasis on developing new perspectives.

One area of the discipline where this observation has been the most pronounced in is urban geography. Owing to the fact that, until recently, much of urban theory has come from the West, particularly the United States and the UK, understandings of the functioning and roles of cities have been Western-centric. Cities such as Singapore have only really entered the global picture in the last 40 years, and so have gone through very different transformations due to their rapid development and different political situations. One interesting research project I am currently undertaking is questioning Sassen’s conception of a ‘global city’. Her definition of what makes a city ‘global’ is based on how they are control centres in the global economy (Tyner, 2000), exhibiting characteristics such as large concentrations of finance and service corporations, and advanced producer services. By looking at the concept of global cities, but from the perspective of Asian cities, it can be argued that cities do not necessarily have to fulfil these restrictive categories in order to be considered global. Some particular examples that have come up are Phnom Penh, which is a centre for international NGO activity, and Manila, which is an exporter rather than receptor of global labour. Although these may not link the cities into the global network in the traditional way, it can be argued that they are important drivers of the network at a different level.  

This way of looking at theory is what Jacobs refers to as ‘subtraction’ (Jacobs, 2012). Rather than saying that new cases (ie. Asian cities that have recently come onto the geographical radar) add to urban theory, she believes that they we should celebrate urban difference rather than using new insight as ‘evidence of an evolutionary trajectory of urban development that [culminates] in Western European urban forms’ (Jacobs, 2012, 906).

Although I am still at an early stage in my year abroad, I hope that the rest of the modules that I take continue to approach geographical issues from a less Western perspective as I believe that it has already significantly broadened my views of Geography.

References

Jacobs, J. (2012) ‘Commentary- Comparing Comparative Urbanisms’, Urban Geography, 33,6, 904-914

Tyner, J. (2000) ‘Global Cities and Circuits of Global Labour: The Case of Manila, Philippines’, Professional Geographer, 52, 1, 61-74