Sizzle to Fizzle
SEOUL, South Korea — For the first time, a majority of the world's people live in metropolitan areas, and the most electric urban experiences are in East Asia. Four of the world's largest metropolitan areas -- Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo -- are there, as well as eight of the 10 tallest buildings.
At night, the neon-lit landscapes bustle with an energy that would impress the most jaded denizens of New York City. Slick subways, ferries, a rising number of arts museums and state-of-the-art stadiums adorn these urban centers. Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore are shedding their dirty, polluted, manufacturing images for the slick, clean industrial look. The once horrifically filthy Han River in Seoul is being cleaned up and bordered with tree-lined parks.
But those skyscraping symbols of supremacy also may signify the end of an era barely 30 years old. The effects of sudden affluence and extremely high population densities -- three or more times greater than New York -- have undermined the Confucian values that were the foundation of these cities.
Urban dynamism is no stranger in East Asia. Before 1500, many of the world's most sophisticated, wealthiest and best organized cities were in China, as Marco Polo and others observed. But 400 years later, after Europe achieved technological and commercial preeminence, only Tokyo remained a city comparable to its Western counterparts.
Asia's growing cities -- Singapore, Hong Kong, Bombay, Calcutta and, most important, Shanghai -- were largely products of Western colonialism. These "queens of the Further East," as one early 20th century British writer described them, served as entrepots for European products, garrisons for colonial forces and administrative capitals of European authority. They were also notorious for their corruption, prostitution, drug dealing and criminal gangs. "If God lets Shanghai endure," one missionary said, "he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah."
Most of East Asia outside Japan, however, remained an agrarian backwater. Only 3% of Koreans lived in cities in 1900. Seoul, the ancient capital, was a backward Japanese colonial city with barely 200,000 residents, the vast majority of them poor. Much of ancient and Japanese-built Seoul was demolished in the Korean War and, until the early 1960s, the city's per capita income ranked with that of Cairo and Calcutta.
