The Postcolonial Condition Of Architecture In Asia

This book provides a bidirectional investigation of Asia’s spatiotemporality by asking how Asia is located and how localities are Asianized. The author examines “display-ness” as a theoretical common divisor and argues that Asia’s architectural and urban spectacle is as meaningful and significant as an indicator of Asia’s postcolonial condition.

In Behind the Postcolonial Abidin Kusno shows how colonial representations have been revived and rearticulated in postcolonial Indonesia. The book shows how architecture and urban space can be seen, both historically and theoretically, as representations of political and cultural tendencies that characterize an emerging as well as a declining social order. It addresses the complex interactions between public memories of the present and past, between images of global urban cultures and the concrete historical meanings of the local. It shows how one might write a political history of postcolonial architecture and urban space that recognizes the political cultures of the present without neglecting the importance of the colonial past. In the process, it poses serious questions for the analysis and understanding of postcolonial states.

With the impending demise of modernist planning, the footprints and corpses of failed modernist visions are littered everywhere. A vacuum of implementable urban theories has occurred at the time when unprecedented expansion and restructuring of cities in rapidly developing economies are taking place. In this collection of essays, William S W Lim zeroes in on the peculiarities and dynamics of present Asian urban and architectural conditions in order to challenge and transcend the socio-ecological forms and political influences generated by the current system of global capitalism.Part I of this book consists of the main essay, which attempts to establish baselines for an effective formulation of ethical urbanism in Asia, by clarifying issues that have previously been unquestioningly bound up with Western values and discourses. As an architect/urbanist, Lim lends a determinedly spatialist and environmental perspective to issues such as rights, ethics, happiness and social justice, while compelling his readers to rethink previously established notions about them.Part II of this book consists of three city studies on Hanoi, Shanghai and Singapore, completed in the last two years, which attempt to match Lim's theoretical formulation with actual conditions occurring in Asia today. Also included is “Asian Architecture in the New Millennium”, a fascinating discourse on contemporary design conducted from a postmodern perspective.

Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, is a former colony of the British Empire which today prides itself in being a multicultural society par excellence. However, the Islamisation of the urban landscape, which is at the core of Malaysia’s decolonisation projects, has marginalised the Chinese urban spaces which were once at the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Engaging with complex colonial and postcolonial aspects of the city, from the British colonial era in the 1880s to the modernisation period in the 1990s, this book demonstrates how Kuala Lumpur’s urban landscape is overwritten by a racial agenda through the promotion of Malaysian Architecture, including the world-famous mega-projects of the Petronas Twin Towers and the new administrative capital of Putrajaya. Drawing on a wide range of Chinese community archives, interviews and resources, the book illustrates how Kuala Lumpur’s Chinese spaces have been subjugated. This includes original case studies showing how the Chinese re-appropriated the Kuala Lumpur old city centre of Chinatown and Chinese cemeteries as a way of contesting state’s hegemonic national identity and ideology. This book is arguably the first academic book to examine the relationship of Malaysia’s large Chinese minority with the politics of architecture and urbanism in Kuala Lumpur. It is also one of the few academic books to situate the Chinese diaspora spaces at the centre of the construction of city and nation. By including the spatial contestation of those from the margins and their resistance against the state ideology, this book proposes a recuperative urban and architectural history, seeking to revalidate the marginalised spaces of minority community and re-script them into the narrative of the postcolonial nation-state.

This book is the first overall and detailed discussion of contemporary Asia’s architectural theorisations and phenomena based on its heteroglossic and decolonisation character. Lin presents a theoretical journey of transdisciplinary reflection upon contemporary Asia’s pragmatic phenomena which is methodologically achieved by means of elaborations of how tangible Asian architecture can be philosophically theorised and how interchangeable architectural theory is practically ‘Asianised’. Discussions in the book are critically integrated with comparative studies focused on Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. These empirical examinations are highlights of phenomenal localities, architecture, cities and cultures which reference the historicity of the Asia Pacific, Asia’s contemporary architectural situations, and their subtle relationship with the ‘West’. The schematisation of intended ‘fuzziness’ for Asia and its architecture is framed as the notion polychronotypic jetztzeit to represent a present time-place context of contemporary Asian architecture and urbanism. This book will be of great interest to scholars of Asian Studies, Architectural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies and Cultural Studies.

From new museum construction to the re-purposing of colonial monuments, and from essentialized narratives to spaces which encourage visitors to dream, this book explores the development and influence of national museums in three contemporary Asian societies – Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Critical Reflections draws together the multi-disciplinary research of scholars working in/on cities across Southeast Asia. The fourteen essays collected in the volume are organised into three thematic sections: (re)conceptualisation, competition and intervention. Collectively, these reflections contribute to and interrogate the expanding urban and regional studies literature. The volume constitutes a critical corrective to the existing literature which all-too-often seeks to diagnose contemporary urban trends everywhere from a small number of, mostly Western, "paradigmatic cases". Yet, while acknowledging the increasing interconnectedness and shared global orientation of most cities in Southeast Asia, the volume is wary of positing an equally generalising regional model. Individually, these essays attend to the diversity of contemporary urban experiences in Southeast Asia.