The Impossibility Of Mapping Urban Asia

Following the lifework (1960s to 2010) of visionary Singaporean architect William S. W. Lim, The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) is a compelling compilation of case studies and historical projects. This multifaceted publication takes Lim's ideas to a future Asia: a region defined by an irreducibly complex urban topography under constant flux. Looking from Singapore to Southeast Asia, and from this region to Asia more expansively (and beyond), it presents a diverse range of activities which may be productively framed through the notion of critical spatial practice.The book has three interconnected points of departure: Lim's lifework; the interdisciplinary exhibition 'Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts at Critical Spatial Practice' at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and the related conference, 'The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia)'; and the cross-cultural and urban festival 'CITIES FOR PEOPLE, NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17', held at venues around Gillman Barracks, Singapore. The multiple links are emphasised in three key ways: through editorial texts, through design concepts, and through selected projects inserted as 'intermissions' between each of the book's sections.Artists, planners, activists, architects, scholars get together in this volume to respond to Lim's critical spatial practice. Research essays, artworks, visual and textual documentation, spatio-temporal maps grapple with the diversity of Southeast Asia, offering unexpected responses to planning, building, and living cities and urban spaces, but also put forward the question, 'Who owns the city?'. This key collection offers a path into spatial questions in Asia and beyond, and serves as a teaching and research tool.

This book is an unusual attempt to study urban regeneration. First, it is based on mapping the realities of urban regeneration case study examples and their impacts on people, places, and city life experiences. Second, it is context-specific, exploring only a particular region rather than covering one country or multiple locations. Hence, the aim is to avoid generic and global solutions but rather focus on local pathways and directions. Third, it delves into specific case study examples that could share some lessons for research, practice, and academia, particularly in the field of urban regeneration. This book is the first of (hopefully) many more on the way in urban mapping studies with various themes and focus areas. The ultimate goal is to ensure urban mapping is recognized well and practiced extensively in research and education. It is essential to map realities in cities and communities, those that we usually witness but should be experienced, perceived, and touched—not just via desk research. Mapping techniques are more than just common tools in urbanism, urban geography, urban studies, urban planning, etc. They are not just tools but inventive ways of understanding cities, places, communities, experiences, and people. Thus, in this book, we try to understand more about people and places through life experiences and mapping the urban regeneration projects of multiple cities in Yunnan Province. This collection is based on a very concise context-specific research focused on only one region. The decision to do so is intentional, just because contextual, cultural, and local attributes need to be looked at more accurately, considerably, and dexterously. Hence, this collection delves into case study examples of an inspiring location where traditions remain, resources are plenteous, and cultures are diverse. Yunnan is one of the few provinces left in China that offers a lot for comprehensive research studies at the urban, rural, and township levels. The experiences we gained from mapping studies, observations, and multi-stakeholder engagements are exceptionally rich and vibrant, allowing us to think more holistically and find ways and suggestions beyond just the generic globalized models elsewhere. We hope the book will be useful to various stakeholders, particularly urban specialists, researchers, and students. It is also a valuable collection for policymakers, decision-makers, and governmental authorities, who should refrain from top-down processes and bring back people to the heart of urban regeneration processes.

Artists and writers go beyond disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to address the fight for environmental justice, uniting the Asia-Pacific vantage point with international discourse. Modeling the curatorial as a method for uniting cultural production and science, Climates. Habitats. Environments. weaves together image and text to address the global climate crisis. Through exhibitions, artworks, and essays, artists and writers transcend disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to bring their knowledge and experience to bear on the fight for environmental justice. In doing so, they draw on the rich cultural heritage of the Asia-Pacific, in conversation with international discourse, to demonstrate transdisciplinary solution-seeking. Experimental in form as well as in method, Climates. Habitats. Environments. features an inventive book design by mono.studio that puts word and image on equal footing, offering a multiplicity of media, interpretations, and manifestations of interdisciplinary research. For example, botanist Matthew Hall draws on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to discuss human-plant interpenetration; curator and writer Venus Lau considers how spectrality consumes—and is consumed—in animation and film, literature, music, and cuisine; and critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli proposes “Water Sense” as a geontological approach to “the question of our connected and differentiated existence,” informed by the “ancestral catastrophe of colonialism.” Artists excavate the natural and cultural DNA of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; works at the intersection of art, design, and architecture explore “The Posthuman City”; an ongoing research project investigates the ecological urgencies of Pacific archipelagos. The works of art, the projects, and the majority of the texts featured in the book were commissioned by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Copublished with NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Contributed articles; chiefly with reference to India and China.

This book gives insights into the basic values and life styles of peoples of ten societies in East, Southeast, South and Central Asia. Based on data from AsiaBarometer public surveys of 2003, it examines human values and life styles of peoples in Urban Asia. It presents country profile and comparative analysis by well-informed scholars, reports of the entire questionnaires (both standard common English language questionnaire and local language questionnaires), the whole comparable tabulated figures by society, the sampling methods and sizes and fieldwork in ten societies.

This book examines the active role of urban citizens in constructing alternative urban spaces as tangible resistance towards capitalist production of urban spaces that continue to encroach various neighborhoods, lanes, commons, public land and other spaces of community life and livelihoods. The collection of narratives presented here brings together research from ten different Asian cities and re-theorises the city from the perspective of ordinary people facing moments of crisis, contestations, and cooperative quests to create alternative spaces to those being produced under prevailing urban processes. The chapters accent the exercise of human agency through daily practices in the production of urban space and the intention is not one of creating a romantic or utopian vision of what a city "by and for the people" ought to be. Rather, it is to place people in the centre as mediators of city-making with discontents about current conditions and desires for a better life.