The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanisms

The Asian urban landscape contains nearly half of the planet's inhabitants and more than half of its slum population living in some of its oldest and densest cities. It encompasses some of the world's oldest civilizations and colonizations, and today contains some of the world's fastest growing cities and economies. As such Asian cities create concomitant imagery polarizations of poverty and wealth, blurry lines between formality and informality, and stark juxtapositions of ancient historic places with shimmering new skylines. With Asia's re-emergence on the global stage, there is an acute focus on its urban identities: What are Asian cities going to become? Will they surpass the economic and environmental debacles of the West? This collection of 24 essays offers scholarly reflections and positions on the complex forces shaping Asian cities today; on why Asian cities are different from the West; and whether they are treading a different path to their futures. Their combined narrative is framed around three sections: "Traditions" reflects on indigenous urbanisms and historic places. "Tensions" reflects on the legacies of Asia's East-West dialectic through both colonialism and Modernism. "Transformations" examines Asia's new emerging utopias and urban aspirations. Addressed to architects and urbanists, practitioners and students, Asian and Western, the broad frame of this book from Turkey to Japan, Mongolia to Indonesia - seeks to capture the breadth and depth of urban issues affecting Asia, rather than focused discussion on particular topic or region. It is offered as a re-introduction to Asia as a source of extraordinary knowledge that can challenge our very fundamental pre-conceptions of what cities are and ought to be.