Written with Elliott and Manu on the occasion of YAG’s 10th anniversary. Published in Caravanserai, the magazine of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs (RSAA). Click here for the article’s PDF print version.
More than ten years ago, you could see us wandering the streets of Yangon with camera and notepad in hand. Yangon seemed to be waking up from a long and uneasy sleep. A few years earlier, in 2010, Myanmar had begun opening up in a staged liberalisation process after several decades of self-imposed isolation. Its former capital was cautiously re-entering the global imagination. There was a palpable sense of change in the air.
In The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra looks at the Israel-Palestine conflict since October 7, 2023 within a postcolonial framework. The reviews for the book were mixed. Not in the traditional sense though. The divided verdict reflects deep cleavages in our societies.
I lived in London during my undergraduate years from 2003-2006 and again from 2011-2012 while working at the EBRD. I have visited many times in between these points and of course ever since, as we still have many friends and family in town.
I just realized that the category “London” on this blog has some substantive posts put up mainly in 2013. They resulted from me wandering about interesting parts of town and taking notes on the blog, a process with which I had become accustomed to in Tokyo — one may call it reflective serendipity. I also took a walk down memory lane in 2017, reflecting primarily on my alma mater SOAS.
And yet, did I ever truly know the city?
I went on a somewhat different, literary trip down memory lane last week while I read the fabulous Night Haunts by Sukhdev Sandhu. In 12 poetic chapters, he portrays Londoners and their night-time occupations, from graffiti artists to Thames bargers, from workers in the sewers to foxhunters, from minicab drivers to Samaritans answering distress calls.
It’s a beautiful and haunting meditation on a rarely appreciated side of the capital. When we think of night-time in the big city, we often focus on a form of premediated and profit seeking “night-life”, primarily as a cultural phenomenon. In his book, Sandhu reclaims the night on behalf of some of its more interesting and darker characters. They inhabit a different world from ours.
By now, Night Haunts has historical value, too, given that it was written almost 20 years ago, around the time I lived in the UK. Some of the “night tribes” have disappeared amid the ongoing modernization of the city as well as technological change. There are no more Thames bargers, and minicabs, too, have disappeared.
As I lived in this London, I thought I’d have something to reminisce about reading this book. However, most of the worlds Sandhu portrays were alien to me back then. It feels ghostlike reading this now. It is a beautiful mediation on space and time. Times long gone but also times still missed each night, sleeping in one’s bed.
Close to where we live, a short walk west on the Bay Run, lies Callan Park, a 60-hectare open green space with several heritage listed buildings on it. We have walked and cycled here often in our three and a half years in Sydney. With a rich and complicated past, the future of this central green space is all but certain.
For those in the political center, housing policy is primarily viewed from a supply side angle. We need to build more so that prices come down, goes the mantra. New housing construction and its affordability is inherently linked to housing productivity, i.e., how much share of a building a worker can build in an hour, or more elegantly, a worker’s gross value added per hour (which accounts for quality related aspects of new housing).
Housing productivity is down everywhere in the developed world. One reason that is often cited is the Baumol Cost Disease, i.e., productivity in labor-intensive sectors is stagnant and thus the cost of products produced or services rendered increases faster than inflation. With much of the work unautomated and provided custom-made on site, the construction sector is a case in point, almost as intuitive as the hairdresser usually chosen an an example.
However, a significant explanation for falling productivity is also related to its measurement. If a builder sells you a prefab house and assembles it on site for you (with some additional material), much of the gross value added is now accounted for in intermediary goods, causing overall productivity to fall.
I first came across this interesting debate while listening to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show a while back. Jake Auchincloss, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, suggested the Cost Disease in construction is one of the main drivers of the cost of living crisis. And hence the way to alleviate this problem is by getting more prefabricated housing into the mix.
I am excited that an article I co-wrote with Jessica Ilunga and Jorge Almazan of Keio University has just been published in Cities. We took a closer look at three redevelopment areas in Tokyo: Musashi-Koyama, Tsukishima and Shimokitazawa.
Growing up in East Berlin in the 1990s, Die Linke (or PDS, as it was known before) was omnipresent. Still the party’s most recognizable face, Gregor Gysi is still running and winning in my district (Treptow-Koepenick). I still get a sense of home and the past when I see him speak.
The complexities of the Wende / transition period after the Wall fell in 1989 found an important political outlay in the party, taking along (or trying to at least) a significant part of the East German population that found adjustment to the new system difficult.
Recently Die Linke has transformed itself into a more modern progressive party, increasing its appeal to younger generations. It thankfully saw a more national and populist wing under the leadership of Sarah Wagenknecht split from it ahead of the elections.
As a result, it staged a historic comeback from what seemed a certain sub-five percent vote to a respectable 8.8%. It also came in as the strongest party in Berlin.
It is good that their ideas, especially some of the more radical ones, will be represented in the German parliament and get some more airtime in the public discourse. Among these are that we should strive to live in a world without billionaires and that rents should be capped and housing socialized.
One of the unused datasets from the Citiesarticle was on average taxable income per capita across the 23 wards between 1985 and 2022 (kindly provided by the authors of this great article).
For the period I worked on for my PhD (1950/55-1975), this data was not available so I had to look at proxy indicators, primarily living space per capita. This came with its own limitations but provided opportunities to transcend a purely economic measurement of living standards.
My analysis found a compression in inter-ward inequalities between the 1950s and 1970s. What happened since then?
I am putting up a few posts on Tokyo in the coming days. They are about my recent work on residential redevelopments outside of the yamanote ring that I have carried out with Jessica Illunga and Jorge Almazan of Keio University.
It’s a tad ironic that I have become so engaged in this contemporary urban development issue. My first home in Tokyo was ARK Hills in Roppongi 1-chome, where we lived for half a year between 2012-13. ARK Hills opened its gates in the 1980s and is arguably the ground zero of neoliberal Tokyo.
Until ten or so years ago, these massive mixed-use developments still had a relatively unique aura. They were concentrated in the center and lured their well-heeled inhabitants with distinct architecture, upscale dining and retail, as well as cultural venues. This is the Mori Tokyo.
I put up quite a few Instagram posts back in 2012 (which, the Luddite I am, was the only time I really used the platform) and paste some below, with a few other reflections, for nostalgic reference.
We finally visited India again after an eternity. The last time we went was in 2014. With our move to Japan, having kids and then COVID, it just wasn’t possible earlier.
