SEAC hosted Visiting Professor Tamaki Endo (Saitama University) who presented research from her upcoming co-authored book Urban Risk and Well-Being in Asian Mega Cities: Urban lower and middle classes in Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tokyo (Routledge, forthcoming).
With rapid and compressed development and urbanisation, emerging cities in the Global South face challenges similar to those of the Global North, such as increased inequality, informalisation, and diversified needs for social safety nets. This presentation explores the characteristics and complexities of the urban well-being of the lower and middle classes in Asian megacities. Risk responses are a critical determinant of individual well-being in times of increasing uncertainty.
By using data from questionnaire surveys of about 2,700 respondents in three cities (Shanghai, Bangkok, and Tokyo) from 2011 to 2014 (and follow-up surveys afterwards), it provides information on the kinds of risks people perceive and experience in their urban life, how they respond to them, what kinds of social networks and formal/informal institutions they utilise, and how the quantity and quality of social networks and safety nets matter for one’s subjective well-being, such as life satisfaction. One of the key paradoxes from our survey was the fact that the lower classes in Tokyo, supposed to be residents in the most developed city, were the most dissatisfied group with their lives. Employing an interdisciplinary approach combining quantitative and qualitative analysis with a historical review, it shows differences are not necessarily ‘cultural’ but defined by the social and historical contexts of certain periods.
Owing to compressed development, Asian megacities are strategic analytical fields where the challenges of emerging countries and developed countries occur simultaneously. By clarifying commonalities and differences, it provides detailed insights into the resilience and vulnerabilities of urban residents in the era of uncertainty in urban context.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Prof. Tamaki Endo is a Professor at Graduate School ofHumanities and Social Sciences, Saitama University in Japan. Her research interests include informal economy, inequality, urban risk management and global value chain analysis. The current research projects are‘Informalizing Asia: Dynamics and dilemma of global mega cities’, ‘Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Urban Informality: The case of Thailand’ and ‘Flood risk and resilience in mega cities: The case of Thailand and Myanmar’. Main publications are Living with Risks: Precarity & Bangkok’sUrban Poor (NUS Press association with Kyoto University Press, 2014), The Asian Economy: Contemporary Issues and Challenges (Goto, Endo and Ito [eds], Routledge, 2020) and Urban Risk and Well-Being in Asian Mega Cities: Urban lower and middle classes in Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tokyo, (Endo and Shibuya [eds], Routledge, forthcoming). She received her B.A. in Law and Politics from Faculty of Law (1999), and her M.A. (2001) and PhD (2007) in Economics from Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.