Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present

Home to more city dwellers than any other region, and the locus of many of the world’s most populous metropolitan areas, Asia is moving to centre stage in popular and academic debates about planetary urban futures. Among diverse urban Asias are landscapes, images, visions and aspirations that conjure new forms of the future. This volume comprises essays examining intersections of the urban and futurity. While attentive to emergent forms of urban Asia, contributors also examine futures past, the afterlives of historical projects, and archaeologies of the future. While authoritative forms of future city-making feature in several essays, others focus on everyday engagement with futurity. Many essays provide ethnographic and field-based empirical insights into urban lifeworlds that are coming into being, while others explore the theoretical and political implications of urban futures from Asia.