Book Review - Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking

Transcultural Cities is an edited text containing a diverse and cross-disciplinary selection of case studies centred around place-making through transcultural processes.The 21 chapters focus on distinct and specific spaces where cultures meet, and the strategies taken as communities negotiate with and around each other.The key idea in this text is the concept of transculturalism, and the authors draw from Pratt (1992), among others, to note how places are changed through the different cultures acting and interacting upon them.This book ultimately seeks lessons from the case studies, and Hou in his introductory chapter outlines the ways in which transcultural spaces potentially make cities safer and more accessible for their increasingly diverse populations, creating more livable urban experiences and mutual understanding.The rest of the book is divided into five parts, each containing four chapters.The first, Placemaking at the Margins, presents a series of case studies: South Asian Muslims in Chicago, Brazilian restaurants in Tokyo, West African immigrants in Seattle, and Chinese traditional festivals in Yangon, respectively.These chapters examine the way marginalised communities -particularly immigrants -inhabit specific places and change the nature of those spaces.For example, in Chapter 2, Sen's case study shows how the community combines religious (prayer) practice with commercial (restaurant) use to produce a transcultural space that can be used for different, and often changing, purposes.In this sense, places that would otherwise be classified as "ethnic" spaces, which tend to exclusivity, instead invite and support multiple communities, inviting hybridities and transcultural identities and activities.The second part, Placemaking in the Space of Flows, is not dissimilar from the first.The chapters continue to examine the transcultural spaces produced by migrant communities: Korean students and small business owners in the Philippines, Chinese migrants in Sydney, Asian migrant workers in West Malaysia, and migrant workers in Sheffield.However, the focus here is on flows, in which the movement of diverse peoples and cultures into and out of the space is key in the changing nature of the place.In Chapter 8, for example, Chang and Foo's case study examines how migrant workers from a diversity of origins: Nepal, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh, among others, interact with the Chinese and Malay community in Kampung Kanthan in p. 157.

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