In parts of Asia, citizens are increasingly involved in shaping their neighbourhoods and cities, representing a significant departure from earlier state-led or market-driven urban development. These emerging civic urbanisms are a result of an evolving relationship between the state and civil society. The contributions in this volume provide critical insights into how the changing state-civil society relationship affects the recent surge of civic urbanism in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei, and the authors present eighteen cases of grassroots activism and resistance, collaboration and placemaking, neighbourhood community building, and self-organization and commoning in these cities. Exploring how citizen participation and state-civil society partnerships contribute to more resilient and participatory neighbourhoods and cities, the authors use the concept of civic urbanisms not only as a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing social and urban change but as an aspirational model of urban governance for cities in Asia and beyond.

Alleyways are an urban form historically shared by most cities in Asia, yet understudied. Our book critically explores "Global Asia" and the metropolization process, specifically from its alleyways, which are understood as ordinary neighbourhood landscape providing the setting for everyday urban life and place-based identities being shaped by varied everyday practices, collective experiences and forces. This turns the traditional approach of "global cities" upside-down and contributes to a renewed conception of metropolization as a highly situated process, where forces at play locally, in each alleyway neighbourhood, are both intertwined and labile. Beyond the mainstream, standardising vision of the metropolization process, the book offers a nuanced overview of urban production in Asia at a time of great changes. As such, the book will be welcomed by an array of scholars, students, and all those interested in the modern transformation of Asian cities and their urban cultures, including new approaches to social life, urban change and urban governance.

The study of urbanization in Southeast Asia has been a growing field of research over the past decades. The Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia offers a collection of the major streams and themes in the studies of the cities in the region. A focus on the urbanization process rather than the city as an object opens the topic more broadly to bring together different perspectives. This timely handbook presents these diverse views to build a clearer understanding of theoretical contributions of urban studies in Southeast Asia and to provide a complete collection of scholarly works that are thematically structured and a useful tool for teaching urbanization in Southeast Asia. Following the introduction by the editor, the handbook is structured along central, emerging themes. It contains six parts, which are each introduced by the editor: Theorizing Urbanization in Southeast Asia Migration, Networks and Identities Development and Discontents Environmental Governance The Social Production of the Urban Fabric Social Change and Alternative Development This handbook will be an essential reference work for scholars interested in Urban Studies, cities and urbanization in Asia, and Southeast Asian Studies.

The book compares different approaches to urban development in Singapore and Seoul over the past decades, by focusing on community participation in the transformation of neighbourhoods and its impact on the built environment and communal life. Singapore and Seoul are known for their rapid economic growth and urbanisation under a strong control of developmental state in the past. However, these cities are at a critical crossroads of societal transformation, where participatory and community-based urban development is gaining importance. This new approach can be seen as a result of a changing relationship between the state and civil society, where an emerging partnership between both aims to overcome the limitations of earlier urban development. The book draws attention to the possibilities and challenges that these cities face while moving towards a more inclusive and socially sustainable post-developmental urbanisation. By applying a comparative perspective to understand the evolving urban paradigms in Singapore and Seoul, this unique and timely book offers insights for scholars, professionals and students interested in contemporary Asian urbanisation and its future trajectories.

China's opkomst als wereldmacht is een van de ingrijpendste gebeurtenissen van deze tijd. Honderden miljoenen mensen zijn de armoede ontvlucht dankzij de snelle industrialisatie van het land. De wonderbaarlijke economische groei van China heeft zijn nadelen, iets wat vaak het meest pijnlijk duidelijk wordt in de steden. Deze studie is geschreven door wetenschappers uit verschillende disciplines, waaronder architectuur, stedenbouw, sociale wetenschappen, aardrijkskunde en antrolpologie. Een dee van de auteurs behandelt de mondiale ambities van de steden, terwijl andere hun culturele en architecturale uitingen onderzoeken.

interdisciplinary, critical, cultural analysis

This book looks at local collective action and city government responses and its impact on the neighbourhood and the city in Pacific Asia.

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 multifarious urban issues and identities: What are Asian cities going to become? Will they surpass the economic and environmental debacles of the West? This collection of twenty-four essays surveys the most dominant issues shaping the Asian urban landscape today. It offers scholarly reflections and positions on the forces shaping Asian cities, and the forces that they in turn are shaping.

This book offers a multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and representation interdependent to urban spaces in China.

To what extent do urban dwellers relate to their lived and imagined environment through aesthetic perceptions, and aspirations? This book approaches experiences of urban aesthetics not as an established framework, defined by imposed norms or legislations, but as the result of a continuous reflexive and proactive gaze, a complex and deep engagement of the mind, body and sensibilities. It uses empirical studies ranging from China, India to Western Europe. Three axes are privileged. The first considers urban everyday aesthetic experiences in the long-term as a historical production, from medieval Italy to a future imagined by science fiction. The second examines the impact of aestheticizing everyday material realities in neighbourhoods, and the tensions and conflicts these engender around urban commons. Finally, the third axis considers these relationships as aesthetic inequalities, exacerbated in a new age of urban development. The book combines local and transnational scales with an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together historians, sociologists, cultural geographers, anthropologists, architects and contemporary art curators. They illustrate the importance of combining different social science methods and functional perspectives to study such complex social and cultural realities as cities. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of humanities and social sciences, cultural and urban studies, architecture and political geography.