Architecture and Urban Studies in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Abstract Urban and architectural spaces that bear the imprint of colonialism were subjects of contestation and resistance throughout the late twentieth century, provoking the renaming of cities, the shift of capitols, and a difficult politics of heritage conservation. Proponents of varied nationalist ideologies have sought to overwrite their material traces with compelling mythologies of place origins and cultural meaning. The politics of development has penetrated these environments via urban reconstruction and post‐disaster relief efforts, while the lingering imagination of a colonial past feeds networks of global consumption through tourism. Postcolonial contestations over space and place as studied through the disciplines of architecture and urbanism highlight key issues that have preoccupied scholars of South and Southeast Asia. New interdisciplinary interpretations of these categories expose the postcolonial politics of an era of nation‐building that preceded economic liberalization. They draw thematically on spatial contestations over postcolonial geographies, indigenous modernities, postcolonial space(s), modernization, globalization, and heritage environments.