Technopolitics of Historic Preservation in Southeast Asian Chinatowns: Penang, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the technopolitics of historic preservation in three Southeast Asian Chinatowns: Penang, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City. I situate this work in the literature on the politics of governmental intervention that views programs of improvement in the larger nexus of knowledge and power (Legg, 2006; Li, 2007; Mitchell 2002; Scott, 1998). Rather than an apolitical technique of intervention, historic preservation goes beyond a strict field of aesthetic restoration. Historic preservation, too, entails its own technopolitics, in which the technical necessarily entails the political. To tease out the technopolitics in historic preservation, I attend to four points of analysis: technique, space, rationale, and politics. First, in urban planning, governmental intervention is enacted through various forms of what I call planning techniques, e.g. maps, zoning, architectural guidelines, and heritage inventory. Second, each of the planning techniques is a kind of spatial intervention. It has its own program of intervention, in which the object of intervention is space. Space, too, takes variously corresponding forms: building height; conservation areas; residential units, construction material; traditional livelihoods, among others. Third, each spatial intervention is justified through a certain rationale, underwritten by a certain epistemic vocabulary. Each spatial intervention is done in the name of vocabularies such as ‘heritage’, ‘density’, ‘progress’. Fourth, in its own way, each planning technique activates its own politics. The term politics in technopolitics implies the twofold deployment and contestation of power. While the chapters take on different planning techniques, from mapmaking to zoning, each of the chapters loyally traces the unfolding of these four points.

I make four arguments. First, while the planning techniques are conceived as solution to a problem, they themselves are not problem-free. The planner attributes his authority to technical knowledge, which, in fact, does not constitute the universe of knowledge, but a selection thereof. Second, a planning problem is often a problematization. A problem does not exist readily. Instead, it has to be constructed and rationalized through a certain vocabulary. It has to be framed in a certain way to lend itself to solution. Third, there are limits to the problematization and its corresponding solution. If technical knowledge may be viewed as selection, there may very well be omission. Fourth, in the face of such omission, contestation is inevitable. I pay attention to the moments of contestation, where the planning techniques clash with things they seek to omit in the first place.