Overview

Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia discusses the lived experience of urban development, redevelopment, and change in Ulaanbaatar. The fast rates of urbanization occurring in many parts of the world are often buoyed by increased investment of capital and ensuing construction, giving rise to other less visible effects among those living in cities—including diverse economic practices, politics, and ethics. Construction becomes a solution to the provision of housing but also simultaneously becomes a problem when economic processes fail to work as they should, or people are dispossessed of land to make way for further urban change.    Rebekah Plueckhahn explores the inherent contradiction between solution and problem-making as experienced by residents of Ulaanbaatar during a tumultuous period in Mongolia’s economic history. She examines the ways residents attempt to own forms of real estate and, in turn, physically shape the city and its politics and urban economic forms from within. This book interlinks the intimate space of the home with ideologies of the national economy, urban development and disrepair and the types of politics and ethics that arise as a result.  

Full Product Details

9781787351530

Table of Contents

Reviews

'As an ethnography of fast-paced uncertain changes, Plueckhahn's book is dextrously researched and artfully conceptualized.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (JRAI) 'Overall this is an excellent and admirably compact study of urban property. It will be an especially useful book for students of Inner Asia's ongoing and messy urbanization. I hope as well that it will find an audience outside of its area studies confines, as the travails of people in Ulaanbaatar seeking to turn the financialization of the city to some sort of private advantage says much about the contemporary city writ large.' Eurasian Geography and Economics 'The added value of this publication is inclusion analysis of the local world of ideas into the most up-to-date urbanization processes in a city-state. Above all, however, it presents a broader view of economic and administrative processes than spent recently and greatly received by anthropologists, Rebecca's Empson studies or Tomasz Rakowski.'Sprawy Międzynarodowe

'Overall this is an excellent and admirably compact study of urban property. It will be an especially useful book for students of Inner Asia's ongoing and messy urbanization. I hope as well that it will find an audience outside of its area studies confines, as the travails of people in Ulaanbaatar seeking to turn the financialization of the city to some sort of private advantage says much about the contemporary city writ large.' Eurasian Geography and Economics 'The added value of this publication is inclusion analysis of the local world of ideas into the most up-to-date urbanization processes in a city-state. Above all, however, it presents a broader view of economic and administrative processes than spent recently and greatly received by anthropologists, Rebecca's Empson studies or Tomasz Rakowski.'Sprawy Międzynarodowe

Author Information

Rebekah Plueckhahn is a McArthur Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne and has been conducting ethnographic research in Mongolia since 2009. She has published on topics including the anthropology of capitalism in Mongolia, land possession and bureaucracy, urbanism, Mongolian musical sociality, causality and morality. She previously held a four-year Research Associate position at UCL and obtained her PhD from the Australian National University in 2014. Rebekah received the 2014 Article Prize from the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available