Porous Enclaves: Blurred Boundaries and Incomplete Exclusion in South East Asian Cities

Abstract

Cities across Asia are increasingly dotted with large, upmarket, seemingly homogeneous and avowedly exclusive master-planned, mixed-use housing and commercial developments. From an outsider's perspective, these projects appear starkly uniform and to have been imposed on urban landscapes with little attempt to integrate them into local social, cultural and economic contexts. Recent research in South East Asia, however, shows how these developments are not in fact hermetically sealed from the surrounding world. Instead, they may be productively understood as ‘porous enclaves’, spaces marked not only by exclusion but by social interaction that cuts across the interfaces of inside and outside, public and private, city and country and local and foreign – all categories presumed to be kept separate in many modern city plans. This introductory article to this special issue on ‘Porous enclaves’ highlights new research at the interface of the porous city and the enclave, and calls on urban studies scholars to pay close attention to the social life within and among the porous enclaves that have emerged in South East Asia.