Chinatown Urbanism: Architecture, Migrancy, and Modernity in East Asia

This dissertation examines transnational spaces of Chinatowns as a point of departure to reflect upon the production of architecture and urbanism on a global scale. More specifically, I trace the genealogy of “Chinatown” in East Asia—how a Chinatown has evolved into a distinct urban type, how it has been created as a discrete category which seems to exhibit inherent propensities, and how it has been mobilized to forge a different kind of space of governance. Contrary to the popular conception of architecture as a material form grounded and fixed in a particular locale, architecture and the built environment have often been the product of moving ideas and practices that migrate across different cultural and geographic contexts. It is also important to note that such traveling of ideas and practices is mediated by human and non-human actors alike, ranging from architects, planners, and researchers to materials, ideas, and images. While illuminating how different modes of global connectivity have enabled practices to build and govern new urban space to travel, this dissertation sheds light on the underexplored role of affect and sentiment as integral to the mobility of built form.This dissertation identifies three important historical shifts shaping and reshaping Chinatowns in East Asia: 1) the opening of East Asian ports to foreign trade and commerce in the late nineteenth century; 2) the onset of the Cold War upon the collapse of the Japanese empire; and 3) China’s (re)opening to global capitalism in post-Cold War East Asia. Drawing from a combined methodology of archival research and ethnography, my analytical focus is primarily placed on how people, things, and affects become circulated at new historical junctures, how people feel while encountering with novel spaces and objects, and how things come into play when people try to make sense of their places in a changing world. I argue that the global production and circulation of affects, closely associated with the geopolitical context in which they take place, have played a significant role in governing Chinese space and subjectivity, making Chinatown as a distinct urban “type”—a self-contained entity imagined to represent a different space of governance. I further contend that it is also the capacity of affect to propel action that enables Chinese residents to question the static meanings attached to their spaces, bring in materials and ideas from elsewhere, and thus redefine the idea of Chinatown