At the end of 2024, I was very pleased to see the publisher proofs of a forthcoming book that I co-edited with Dr Dong-Wan Gimm, entitled The Political Economy of Megaprojects in Asia: State power, Land Control, Financial Flows, and Dispossession and to be published by Routledge. More details about the book and its table of contents can also be found on this page.
By examining contemporary megaprojects in China, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, and Turkey, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of how the developmental goals of Asian states are reflected in large-scale projects and how various actors both realise and challenge these goals. There are altogether ten chapters, including the editors’ introduction that sums up the book’s key arguments using the subtitled keywords, which include state power, land control, financial flows, and dispossession.
As the book’s Acknowledgments below state, the publication took a long time to reach its fruition, and I thank profusely the kind patience and commitment shown by my co-editor and contributing authors in particular. This book couldn’t have been possible without them.
The book is expected to be released at the end of February 2025 in hardback version. A paperback version is expected to be made available a year later.
Acknowledgements
The publication of this volume has been a prolonged process, marked by seemingly endless negotiations involving academic and family obligations, further compli- cated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was initially inspired at a confer- ence in Urbino, Italy, in 2015, organized by the Research Committee 21 (RC21) on the Sociology of Urban and Regional Development of the International Socio- logical Association. Some chapters included in this volume were first presented at the conference in sessions titled “(Re-)making Cities: The Politics of Scale in Megaprojects in Asia and Beyond”, while others were added as the publication project progressed. We would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their admirable patience, collegiality, and dedication to this project. We also thank the contributors to the RC21 conference sessions, whose excellent papers we were unable to include as the book’s focus shifted.
We acknowledge the support of the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044551 and NRF-2017S1A3A2066514) for part of the work discussed in this book. Special thanks go to Bae-Gyoon Park, who co-organized the RC21 conference session and provided support for the project’s development, as well as to Bridget Martin and Elise Youn for their patient help with proofreading many of the chapters in this volume. We are also grateful to Emily Kindleysides and Kristina Abbotts for their encouragement at the inception and completion of the project, respectively, in their roles as senior editors at Routledge. Despite the protracted production schedule, we believe the arguments raised by our contributors remain salient and add value to the existing debates on megaprojects in Asia and beyond.