In recent years, anthropological research based on STS (science, technology and society) has been a major trend in contemporary anthropology. But in anthropological urban studies, less attention has been given to the technical aspects of the city. In this paper, I present a case study of a pilot project for the implementation of a compact city model within the city planning of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, especially from the point of view of the reduction of urban air pollution. Theoretically, I aim to locate this case study by extending the studies of the "technology of the city" -borrowing from Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow- and link it to urban anthropological studies and STS. Rabinow borrowed the term "bio-technico-political" from Foucault to analyze modernity: namely, as a field of power relations composed of both discursive and nondiscursive practices. Investigating that aspect, I suggest the possibility of an anthropology of the city focused on the "obduracy" of the city in urban socio-technical change. Since the end of the 20th century, the population of Ulaanbaatar City has increased rapidly because of urban migration. Most of the newcomers from the countryside have settled in "Ger areas" (a "ger" is a traditional Mongolian tent) in the periphery of Ulaanbaatar. The population of such Ger areas now accounts for about 60% of the city's population. The air pollution caused by smoke from ger chimneys has become a major urban problem in Ulaanbaatar. In this paper, I introduce three methods of intervention as technologies of the city to address that urban problem as a phenomenon of obduracy in urban socio-technical change. In doing so, I aim to clarify the process of the transformation of the technology of the city, showing how the obdurate urban structure sustaining the urban environmental problem can become malleable. The first method of intervention has been to carry out traditional urban planning, based on constructing apartment buildings in the Ger areas. That method has been implemented since socialist days, and still takes place in current urban planning. Indeed, one major aim of the urban planning for Ulaanbaatar, approved by the Mongolian government in 2002, is to replace Ger areas with apartments (section 1 of chapter III). But in 2003, land privatization was initiated in the Ger areas for citizens' dwellings, making it difficult to replace entire Ger areas by constructing apartment buildings (section 2 of chapter III). The second method of intervention has been to carry out community-based development projects (section 3 of chapter II). In my paper, I focus on a project implemented by UDRC (Urban Development Research Center), a local NGO in Ulaanbaatar. The main activities of the UDRC are based on the implementation of the community-based development approach to improving the living environment of Ger areas in Ulaanbaatar. Its main objective is "to encourage collaborative activities that would promote sustainable development and poverty reduction in urban areas." To achieve that objective, they establish savings groups (community-based organizations) in Ger areas. I introduce a case study of one CBO and show how it has improved the living environment. One noteworthy character of the membership of the CBO is that all are new landowners and their family members. Except for the landowners, all people (including temporary dwellers in gers) do not qualify for membership in the CBO. That poses a difficult problem for the reduction of urban air pollution, however, because the pollution caused by smoke from ger chimneys is the same whether one is a landowner or not. The third method of intervention has been to carry out a pilot project for the implementation of a compact city model in the city planning for Ulaanbaatar (chapter IV). I present a case study of city planning technology as described in a

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

This article presents a case study of a newly-built village near Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia in order to show the "obduracy" of an urban area in contemporary Malaysia and its effects. Obduracy is a concept derived from Anique Hommels, a Dutch scholar of science, technology, and society. In a recent study, she defines a city as a set of material and immaterial objects. Using the concept of obduracy, she considers how a certain part of the city stands against change and maintains that stance through time. Her attempt, which aims to describe a network built around obdurate buildings, is to re-conceptualize a city from the perspective of obduracy; it has been discussed mainly in terms of change and fluidity. Obdurate artifacts in urban areas, such as large buildings, obstruct the flow of people and fix their mobility. When people build roads, erect buildings, or create settlements, their lives get mediated and even altered by them. According to recent anthropological studies on materiality, material things make up a certain aspect of human life. This paper acknowledges the mediating role of obdurate settlements and shows the kind of community that actualizes on such settlements. In Malaysia, urban planning takes place with the intention of setting goals for the future. On the basis of the national development principle, "Wawasan (Vision) 2020," presented in 1991 by the then-Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir, outlines a plan to transform Malaysia into a fully-developed country by the year 2020. Malaysia hopes to become a developed state by that year, and the illegal settlements (or squatter settlements) built in urban areas are regarded as unsuitable for a well-developed society and detrimental to a grand futuristic design. The government has formulated the Zero Squatter Policy in each state to reduce the, number of squatter settlements every year and eventually bring it down to zero to help meet that goal. With the implementation of the policy, some settlements -although large in scale- unexpectedly disappeared in a short period of time. However, a variety of these settlements remain, despite there being no place for them in the national Vision. Such settlements do not easily disappear on account of some powers and institutions at work. As a case study, this paper is concerned with kampung ("village" in Malaysia) K, an urban village built in the 1970s. It is located near Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of Sabah, Malaysia. Kota Kinabalu is a small city, with a population of no more than 500,000. However, it plays a key economic and political role in Sabah, which is far from the Malay Peninsula, the center of the federation. People coming to the state capital from the interior, looking for work, found a piece of unoccupied public land that was neither cultivated nor inhabited. Since K village is close to the center of the city, by the end of 1980s, it had become a settlement of 215 households, with a population of more than 1,000 people. The local administration recognized it as an illegal settlement, and it was a target of the urban policy. In the case of K village, however, the status of kampung changed after repeated appeals by the inhabitants. They lodged a petition emphasizing their legal status as "natives of Sabah," not illegal immigrants or foreigners. The intervention of local politicians also played an important role in supporting their arguments. As a result, in 1998, most of the land was finally proclaimed in the official gazette as a legal "Native Reserve," according to Sabah's land laws. However, some parts of K village were not granted legal status. Although those parts were expected to disappear, they continued to exist around the main village, as some infrastructure such as roads, water pipes, and electric lines connected the two areas. K village has existed in the same place as a whole owing to the configuration of

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

In contemporary cities in developing countries, many urban planning and urban development projects have been carried out with the aim of coping with the various problems created by rapid urbanization. Those projects, in many instances, utilize globalized knowledge and technologies through international development cooperation programs. How, then, are that knowledge and those technologies transformed or adjusted in their course towards becoming actually realized in specific cities? This paper aims to ethnographically describe and analyze a bus-interchange construction project in Hanoi, Vietnam, by focusing upon the transformative process of the concepts introduced by foreign experts in the context of specific urban conditions and the administrative decision-making process. Especially, the analysis pays close attention to the complicated situation existing among the technology, politics, and separate visions, as well as the (difficult) attempts by relevant actors to articulate them. The project was conducted mainly by the staff of the UT Center (under the Hanoi Department of Transport), along with foreign and domestic experts. It was part of the so-called "Public Mobility project," an international project based on cooperation with two European cities, with the aim of improving the public transportation system of Hanoi. After selecting the Gam Can area as the site of construction, where the dike road and the railway bridge intersect and traffic congestion was heavy, the project team constructed the design plan paying attention to the existing traffic conditions of the area and the future public transportation systems (the "South option"). It was innovative in constructing a big traffic island (i.e., a big roundabout) to regulate traffic flows and create an urban public space, as well as in making transfers between bus lines more efficient and comfortable. The plan had once been approved by the authorities, but was drastically altered to the "North option," the basic design of which had also been created by the project team but not selected, after the appointment of a new director of Hanoi's Department of Transport. On closer observation, the process of changing the interchange design was not simply described as some purely political move. The division between political intentions and technical rationality was blurred; or rather, such boundaries were things that the relevant actors tried to articulate to maneuver within uncertain situations. Many anthropological studies of development or policy have described such tactical social interactions that take place during the negotiation process over meanings of plans or roles of relevant parties. But, contrasting with such studies, which mainly analyze the relations between social groups, this case requires inquiry into the more micro processes at work in an organizational context embedded in the administrative structure. Based on my observations of the responses of the Public Mobility project team to the pressure from the new director to change the design, this paper argues that this process was similar to technical controversies analyzed by scholars of science studies, rather than social controversies analyzed in most anthropological literature. One of the characteristics of technical controversies is its involutional mechanism into detailed aspects of the artifacts in question. In other words, the scale of perspective was increasingly reduced in the course of technical controversies. However, the design process by the project team leading into the South option went in the other direction, by relating the concept of interchange with the surrounding elements, including a future Metro station. Here, the enlargement of the scale of perspective was at work; that is to say, the interchange evolved containing human and traffic flows within it. By contrast, the argument of the new director was based on

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

This paper examines an anti-seismic urban reform project in Istanbul, Turkey. Although a great deal of anthropological research has been accumulated into how social orders are formed and maintained in urban situations, modem urban planning has yet to attract a comparable level of interest among anthropologists. For anthropologists who attempt to understand urban society "from the bottom up," urban planning is viewed as a tool used by the authorities to control the local population "from the top down." Anthropologists have therefore traditionally tended to adopt a dichotomic scheme to critically assess urban problems, between "up" (the authorities) and "down" (the local population). But now, the process of urban planning is changing, partly because of social movements based on such criticisms. Concerning the design and implementation of particular plans, the authorities no longer make decisions by themselves, as the private sector now participates in the process, including local CBOs, NGOs and private companies. What is necessary then is to reconsider the scheme for understanding urban planning. Based on a review of relevant literature, I argue for the importance of "real-time" analyses of urban planning projects. In other words, we have to describe a project as a nonlinear process -from concept to realization- and analyze which elements are involved in the project in each of its phases, in order to understand today's urban planning. The project I address in this paper was launched just after the 1999 Kocaeli earthquake that hit northwestern Turkey, causing severe damage and reminding the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) of the high seismic risk of the city. In 2000-02, the IMM conducted a micro-zoning risk analysis of Istanbul in collaboration with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). In 2003, four leading Turkish universities jointly published the Istanbul Earthquake Master Plan, which indicated that urban reform (i.e., razing existing poorly-constructed buildings and replacing them with earthquake-resistant buildings in a given zone) was a likely way to reduce the potential damage of a destructive earthquake in Istanbul. As a result, a pilot project (PP) of urban reform was launched in Z district, one of the most earthquake-prone areas in Istanbul from a geological and civilengineering perspective. What piqued my interest in this project was the fact that the urban reform based on the Master Plan and the PP have yet to be realized, although the IMM had hyped the launch of the PP. In Bruno Latour's words, this project oscillates between "project" and "object": at one point, the construction seems to be on the brink of beginning, but at another point, the implementation seems to be impossible to achieve and the project nearly ceases to exist. However, after several months or years, a revised version with an accompanying implementation plan reappears. This paper attempts to ethnographically describe the transformation of this project while focusing on three periods (2004-5, 2007-8, and 2009), and to analyze the elements involved in the unique temporality of the project. I discuss how the PP progressed and then halted in 2004-05. Through an ethnographic description, I reveal that there were multiple conflicts associated with the project during that period: that between a Japanese planner and Turkish planners; that between the civil engineers' group and the urban planners' group; that between the IMM and the quasi-public urban planning office that received the PP; and that between the authorities and the local people. In a sense, they were inevitable byproducts of the PP, since they were developed through everyday management practices (paket is in Turkish) and the effort to introduce necessary concepts such as "citizens'participation." In that way, the

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)