Cities in East Asia are amongst the world’s largest and fastest growing urban agglomerations. Decades of rapid economic growth and endless urban expansion, under a long arm of the developmental state, however, did not improve the quality of life for everyone. Moreover, cities in East Asia became some of the world’s most vulnerable urban areas for environmental disasters (UN-HABITAT, 2015; Miller and Douglass, 2016). Environmental problems along with the recent economic slowdown, surging unemployment and negative demographic trends, pose serious challenges for their future. National and local governments are, hence, looking for policies that could improve the sustainability of cities and increase their capacity to address these challenges more comprehensively and effectively. At the same time, citizens, civic groups and civil society organizations became more vocal in expressing and struggling for their rights to the city (Daniere and Douglass, 2008; Goh and Bunnell, 2013; Douglass, 2014). As a result, new multi-faceted forms of urban governance are emerging across East Asia, challenging established relations between the state and civil society. This points towards an ongoing restructuring of the statecivil society relations, and to consequent transition from developmental urbanization towards what could be seen as post-developmental urbanization (Cho and Križnik, 2017; Doucette and Park, 2018).
Citizen participation can play a crucial role in building more inclusive and sustainable cities. Involvement of residents in decision making is recognized as an important instrument to improve the living environment in localities, as well as to strengthen local autonomy (Irvin and Stansbury, 2004; Callahan, 2007; Ledwith, 2011; Gilchrist and Taylor, 2016). Citizen participation is considered the cornerstone of a more effective and responsive urban governance as well as of localized social sustainability agenda (Manzi et al., 2010). Civil society in East Asia, however, used to have comparatively weak autonomy in relation to the state, which led to limited citizen participation in the past (Ooi, 2009; Read, 2012). In this regard, citizen participation does not have a long tradition when compared to the Global North. While the specific historical relations between the state and civil society in East Asia are well acknowledged, their consequences for urban development have been less examined, particularly from a comparative cross-cultural perspective (Doucette and Park, 2018; Shin, 2018). The importance of understanding the consequences of state–civil society relations for urban development, in general, seems even more urgent, given the recent surge of citizen participation in shaping the living environment in cities across East Asia (Cho, 2017; Cho and Križnik, 2017; Hou, 2017; Ng, 2017; Kim and Križnik, 2018).