Amidst slums and skyscrapers: The politics of walking and the ideology of open space in East Asian global cities

This project is concerned with the effects of globalization on our lived space of everyday life as witnessed in East Asian metropolises including Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. I explore films and literary works that address the politics of walking because in global culture it is often on the ground of narrativization that walking and the ideology of open space ally. The artistic works I analyze include Hong Kong director Wong Karwai's film Chungking Express, Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto's works Tetsuo, The Body Hammer, and Tokyo Fist, and Chinese novelist Wang Anyi's "Meitou," "Looking for Shanghai," and The Song of Endless Sorrows. I argue that walking in the global city reveals the contradiction between everyday life and globalization. It is through walking that one witnesses vividly the oscillation between the yearning evoked by the ideology of open space and the dejection caused by the compression of living space as a consequence of capital globalization.; Time-space compression makes such ideas as the global village and "This is a small world" catchy phrases. Yet for many of the inhabitants of the global city, the shrinking world takes on a literal meaning: the lived space of everyday life is shrinking to make room for rezoning or construction of infrastructures, all in the name of urban development. The fact that global capital penetrates every corner in the world does not equal to maximum spatial freedom for every user of the global city. In short, for money to flow without obstruction at the fastest speed imaginable, capitalism has been producing urban spaces that are supposed to be open, decentralized, and prosperous. Yet as I hope to demonstrate in this project, the open space embodied by the global city for the capital accumulation is often confining and oppressive for many of the city-users.