Dear critters,

Please consider the call for papers for our international conference on "Lanes and Neighborhoods in cities in Asia" to be held on June 30 - July 1 in Singapore. The conference is jointly organised by the Asian Urbanisms Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (National University of Singapore), in collaboration with the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), The Netherlands.

https://ari.nus.edu.sg/Event/Detail/19eaf934-d283-43aa-acf0-075f0182259c

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (250 words maximum) and a brief personal biography of 150 words for submission by 30 April 2016. Please send all proposals in word document to [log in to unmask] Successful applicants will be notified by 15 May 2016 and will be required to send in a completed draft paper (5,000-8,000 words) by 20 June 2016.


Focusing on an in-depth exploration of neighbourhood formations in city-making, the conference will address the following three lines of inquiry. 

1. Questioning Neighbourhood “production of space” (Lefebvre, 1991) in cities in Asia
2. Everyday Urbanism
3. Neighbourhoods as sites of resistance and alternative city-making

The purpose of this conference is to focus attention on the concept and social meanings of one of the smallest social spheres of the city, the neighbourhood.  The immediacy of this topic can be found in recent urban research positing that the neighbourhood is at substantial risk of fading into history as global mega-projects with vast footprints, master plans, and large-scale privatization of urban space are “kill[ing] much of the urban tissue” of smaller urban spaces.  These are the place-based geographies of the city that have long provided for cosmopolitan diversity and in which marginalized populations are able to assert their agency in city-making (Sassen, 2016:1). Pursuing the “art of being global” (Roy and Ong, 2011), cities in Asia fall more and more within what can be called an “urbanism of projects” (Goldblum, 2015: 374), leading to a rupture with their historic organic urban growth. In that context, urban figures are given priority over urban texture:  “While the pieces of cities are occasionally spectacular, the parts do not add up to anything larger nor do they contribute to the extended setting” (Chow, 2015: 4). The urbanism of projects also acknowledges the primacy of a “super urban network” over local urban territories, opening the way for a “splintering urbanism” (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Once low rise and organic, cities in Asia have engaged into a verticalization process in a functionalist perspective, especially in new urbanized areas flourishing at its edge. These steady transformations affect social cohesion and lead to re-compositions of the historical and structuring forms of lanes and neighborhoods.

The richness of the highly polysemous notion of “neighbourhood” is linked with its reference both to built and social environments. It corresponds to the smallest social unit for urban place-making, a dimension that John Friedmann synthesizes as “a small urban space that is cherished by the people who inhabit it (2009: 5). This universal definition focuses on three main criteria: its small scale, its inhabited dimension and its local attachment and appropriations by local communities. It can be seen both as an intimate place of social encounters and a field of expression of social forces, which is practiced – and thus performed – on a daily basis (Lefebvre, 1991). As such, appropriated lanes and neighbourhoods generate local centralities in the city they belong to.

The conference seeks to reflect on the specificity of the socio-spatial production – and its current evolutions – of neighbourhoods in the Asian context. Theoretically, the objective is to question the everyday nature of the urbanisation process, from the specific perspective of cities in Asia, historically characterized by the “smallness” of their plots division and the richness of lanes’ appropriations, both of them leading to a specific sense of local territoriality. Beyond this theoretical frame, the conference seeks to broaden the debate from a civil society perspective and to engage the discussion with locally rooted activism experiences, working on “reclaiming [the] cities neighbourhood by neighbourhoods” (Friedmann, 2009). In doing so, we are eager to revalue the productions of everyday urbanism and to decipher the richness of local urban and social fabrics from historical as well as contemporary perspectives.   


Best regards,
Marie Gibert

Marie Gibert
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Asian Urbanisms Cluster, Asia Research Institute
National University of Singapore