서울시립대학교 International School of Urban Sciences

      In the second half of the twentieth century, the so-called Four Asian Tigers – Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea – witnesed condensed urbanisation under a strong interventionist state in line with the utopian vision of developmentalism. Entering the twenty-first century, however, strong state intervention is no longer considered a promising strategy for sustainable urban development. Instead, various urban growth models have been proposed as alternatives to the past state-driven approaches by generating a novel urban design and planning process that can encourage participation from all community groups. Such growing attention to alternatives has been developed based on the Asian Tigers’ new utopian vision of ‘post-developmentalism’ that pursues the decentralisation of decision-making authority, the depoliticising of forms of governance and institutionalising mechanisms for community participation in citymaking.

      Although it provides a basis for nurturing revolutionary potential, this new utopian vision can also develop another totalitarian dream through which to centralise decentralisation, bureaucratise depoliticisation, and instrumentalise the institutionalisation of community participation. Against the backdrop of this ambivalent utopian vision, the international forum, ‘Contradiction and practice of urban utopia: a critical review on community-led urban design and planning in Taipei, Singapore and Seoul’ will look at the post-developmental turn in the three cities’ urbanisation, with a focus on what developmental legacies remain and how they influence the realm of urban planning, design, and policy.