Ecotopian imaginations,urban densities and the dispersal of affect in new cities in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Overcrowding, congestion and environmental degradation are often the reasons cited for the building of new administrative and business cities to locations away from existing metropolitan centers. In Asia, the planning of right urban densities has become the dominant paradigm for designing these new cities and selling these cities to investors and citizens. Following the wave of building eco-cities in Asia, framing and dressing this paradigm is the ecotopian imagination of a future of humanity living in harmony with nature and each other, the right densities secured by technological progress in the age of climate crises. We see this imagination at its height in the ongoing planning and construction of Nusantara, the new capital of Indonesia in Kalimantan, heralded as a sustainable forest city sited in the Borneo rainforests. Using a genealogical analysis, we show that the ecotopian imagination began to take hold in Southeast Asia in the reviewing of urban densities and greening of planning and design in Putrajaya (Malaysia) and Singapore from the 1990's to today, and that these are exercises in producing ecotopian densities to right-size urban societies. Analyses of these cities tend to focus on the postcolonial aspect of civilizational representation through spatial design to create nationalistic affects. We argue instead that these cities are sites of utopian futures constructed to disperse affects stemming from discontent regarding urbanization and globalization concentrated in capital cities. However, the ecotopian imaginations may not be potent or persuasive enough to disperse the affects, yet the state cannot afford for the projects to fail. Thus, the state is left with only the temporal fixes of delays and revisions pushing back eco-density targets.