Chinatown Unbound: Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China

Chinatown', as a distinctive ordering of space in cities around the world over, has always been a richly storied place. For many decades represented as a stigmatized and closeted ghetto of aliens, today it tends more often to be portrayed as a valued tourist destination and multicultural asset to cities as distant from each other as Singapore and San Francisco, Toronto and Melbourne, Amsterdam and Havana, London and Yokohama. Strewn globally across the nodes of a diaspora that now numbers in the tens of millions, and in this age of China's so-called rise, Chinatown has undergone a status transition in a number of the world's cities: from marginal enclave under various regimes of colonialism to 'positional good' in a world of circulating symbols and cross-city referencing (Lowry and McCann 2011).