Urban Asia Research Articles

Heat and the city: Thermal control, governance and health in urban Asia

This special issue focuses on the under-studied but increasingly pressing issue of urban heat. Cities are getting hotter, both due to the global crisis of climate change, and the related phenomena of Urban Heat Islands, which locally amplify increased global temperatures and exposure to solar radiation. We know a great deal about how heat is affecting cities from a scientific and public health perspective. Urban studies scholarship, however, has been slower to foreground heat as a social, spatial, and political category of analysis, at least in comparison to discussions of carbon emissions and their control, energy and infrastructure, rising sea levels or flooding, and activism towards sustainability. While many of these themes also figure in this collection, our focus is on the varied phenomena of urban dwellers feeling, avoiding, suffering under, mitigating, culturally interpreting and attempting to anticipate and plan for, the reality of elevated air temperatures and solar radiation. What we call thermal control, governance, and health is the multi-level and multivalent social and material response to uncomfortable and potentially injurious temperatures, an elusive topic this special issue makes visible and constitutes what we hope will be an ongoing urban research agenda.

Bridging the nature–cultural heritage gap: evaluating sustainable entanglements through cemeteries in urban Asia

The expanding footprint of urban Asian settlements and increasing living standards have put pressure on cemetery sites. Public health narratives and the sanctity associated with death matters in Asian urban landscapes have fed into the rhetoric of cemeteries as undesirable heritage spaces. Often lacking protection, many cemeteries have been exhumed, cleared, and relocated to allow room for new developments and infrastructure, risking the survival of this quiet element of the urban cultural patrimony. Within an Asian context, synergies between nature and cultural heritage preservation are not prevalent in major cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok. In light of increasing recognition of urban cemeteries as multi-valued sites with both natural and cultural heritage values, this paper turns to deconstructing the nature–cultural binary and the concept of entanglement to frame an investigation of collaborative interactions. A focused study on Asian urban cemeteries follows, examining existing trends and adapted mix uses and highlighting the region’s unique conservation challenges. The analysis reveals three major typologies encapsulating the region’s current nature–cultural heritage entangled preservation approaches: sustainable compromises, memories, and everyday sustainability. To conclude, the paper distils respectful alternative futures for these spaces to be better integrated into the modern textures of the cities, unlocking functional recourses to destruction or oblivion.

From agriculture to new town: land conversion towards new-build gentrification in the southwest of Jakarta, Indonesia

ABSTRACT Located in the southwest of Jakarta, Pagedangan has been known as one of the hotspots for large-scale residential complexes or ‘new town’ in the Jakarta Metropolitan Area, Indonesia. By using a diachronic approach, we aim to examine spatial transformations of rural Pagedangan at micro-scale from 1901 to 2022 which shows the trajectory of new-build gentrification in the study area. This study thoroughly examines how land conversion transforms the rural Pagedangan into gentrifying urban landscape using historical maps and multitemporal imageries. During the last decade, Pagedangan has experienced massive agricultural land conversion which increased land price in the area. It has become gentrified seen by the rise of new town’s urban economy. Meanwhile, pre-existing irregular settlements, or kampungs, have remained as an assemblage of enclaves in a new town, a realm that completely differs from their previous rural environment. Despite displacement has not yet been the main issue in Pagedangan, kampungs are still possibly at risk of disappearance. This study delivers a comprehensive empirical study on physical gentrification process to provide insights into urban studies discourse, especially in urban Asia. This study proposes kampung as an important spatial entity which government should consider in Indonesian land use planning and urban policy making.

Failed pedestrian street experiments in high-density urban Asia: A matter of policies?

Promoted by sustainable urban agendas and urged by global pandemic measures, street experiments (SE) are booming in Europe but remain latent in Asia. These experiments aim to reconfigure streets as more than spaces for motorized traffic movements, enabling a temporary urban paradigm shift. Such a shift involves balancing active mobility and public space uses in streets while envisioning radically different settings and uses. Recently, eminent scholars urged considering SE in connection to the system and planning framework within which SE are conceived to trace their trajectories. This article examines four decades of temporary-pedestrianization policies and planning instruments in Hong Kong, an Asian city representative of high-density urban environments with highly intensive use of road space and conservative and prescriptive planning. In doing so, the article identifies four trajectories and illustrates two emblematic cases: Chater Road, the first street temporarily pedestrianized under a commercial initiative, and Sai Yeung Choi Street South, a street pedestrianized under a government initiative, now turned back to its original function. The competing roles and practical uses that pedestrianized streets must fulfil partially determined their fate. However, the trajectories these cases followed also differ due to the contextual planning approach and decision-making process. The study contributes to scholarship on SE by shedding new light on the geographical context of high-density urban Asia, forwarding challenges that policymakers might need to address in the planning and governance of SE in similar environments.

Issues of Urban Conservation and Collective Memory. The Case of the Asia Minor Post-refugee Urban Neighbourhood Germanika at Nikea, Piraeus, Greece.

The paper presents the main findings of a research conducted at an Asia Minor post-refugee urban neighborhood located at the Greater Piraeus Region within the metropolitan area of Athens. The research took place from October 2022 to January 2023. The main findings of the research outline the issue of urban conservation in terms of urban collective memory. The paper explores the contemporary physiognomy of an urban Asia Minor refugee settlement that comes up against dereliction, uncontrolled building activity and demolitions of the old refugee houses. To explain the significance of these settlements, the paper combines literature review and field work. Field work includes original cartographic depiction of the exact location of the remaining refugee houses as well as documentation through original drawings of typical housing units in the area. The aim of the paper is to put in the forefront the issue of declaration in terms of collective memory in cases where the socio-cultural significance counterweights the architectural value of the buildings.

Human-wildlife interactions in urban Asia

Human-wildlife interactions in urban Asia

Co-producing ethnicity in urban Asia

ABSTRACT The articles in this special issue examine engagements across ethnic boundaries in Asian cities over the past two centuries. We see these cities as stages for the co-production of ethnicity, where multiple actors, including but not limited to state authorities, have attempted to define, manage, and challenge the social boundaries between their diverse inhabitants. These articles direct our attention to the convergence of three critical themes: the flexibility and ubiquity of ethnic ascription, the top-down and bottom-up co-production of social meaning, and Asian cities as crucial sites of social innovation.

Creative Genre Matters: Trendy Drama and the Rise of the East Asian Global Media Market

The trendy drama, a new TV genre coined to signify contemporary trends, initially emerged in Japan in the 1980s and became popular with middle-class audiences across East Asia for portraying Western-like chic metropolitan lifestyles. This television genre typically consists of a 10 to 13 episode long miniseries with 60 to 90 minute episodes. Their narratives focus on love affairs between rich, attractive, hard-working elites as they question traditional Han Chinese values and consider whether women should be independent, allowed to work, have sex outside marriage, and divorce. While specifically Chinese, these values have influenced cultures across East Asia. While espousing liberal and feminist ideals, they roam from trendy stores, such as fashion clothing and cosmetic shops, to expensive restaurants, and back to their luxurious apartments. Quickly, these dramas became so associated with highlighting current global and local trends and countering tradition that they became known as “trendy dramas”. This genre quickly took off and soon thereafter, South Korea and Taiwan partnered together to create their own versions of trendy dramas that helped generate much of contemporary East Asian popular culture, including the rise of K-Pop. Based on Mittell’s claim that genres function as a means of framing mass audiences’ taste, here I explore the role of this TV genre in the context of globalization and local culture in East Asia and its effect upon reshaping social meanings during the 1980s and the early 2010s. In particular, the Taiwanese trendy dramas played a key role in elevating this genre within the Asian TV market. In this article, I argue that in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, the trendy drama became a way to debate Han cultural values and their role in the lives of liberal metropolitan Asians. In the process, this genre helped reshape the East Asian TV market along with popular culture around the globe. I will begin by describing the history of the trendy drama before focusing on how it debates traditional beliefs and considers the value and utility of feminism and individualism in contemporary urban Asia.

The birth of cool: Heat and air-conditioning in the history of Wuhan, 1950–2020

This article examines the impact of air-conditioning on the history of Wuhan, a Chinese city famed for the oppressive heat of its summers. It draws upon oral history testimony, ethnographic research, and written sources, to argue that air-conditioning has played an important yet underappreciated role in changing local culture, social interactions, and the urban environment. It begins by describing how citizens of Wuhan coped with heat in the Maoist era (1949–1976), examining official heatstroke prevention techniques alongside the everyday practices of local citizens, including the use of bamboo beds and air-raid shelters. It then examines the dialectical relationship between socio-economic and technological change that occurred following the introduction of air-conditioning. This new technology, which required people to close their doors on their neighbours, arrived at the same time that older forms of communal living were becoming untenable. Finally, this article examines the role that air-conditioning has played in creating and alleviating the urban heat island problem, a process of localised climate change that makes cities hotter than their hinterlands. It concludes by exploring how locals feel about urban heating, a problem that seems intractable in Wuhan, as it is throughout much of urban Asia.

The role of ecological management and green infrastructure in improving air quality

In the context of urban Asia, where air quality degradation poses significant challenges, the role of green infrastructure in enhancing air quality emerges as a crucial avenue of exploration. This study delves into the complex interplay among key variables-traffic density, vegetation coverage, green infrastructure density, and air quality improvement—within the Asian urban context. Leveraging a quantitative methodology, the research draws insights from 300 respondents representing diverse Asian countries. Quantitative analysis of the collected data unveils the intricate relationships between these variables. The findings shed light on the positive correlation between higher green infrastructure density and enhanced air quality. Furthermore, the study underscores the importance of vegetation coverage as a mediator that amplifies air quality improvement in the presence of abundant green infrastructure. The role of traffic density adds complexity, revealing unexpected correlations that require further exploration to grasp the nuanced dynamics. In the Asian context, where densely populated cities often grapple with poor air quality, this study contributes to evidence-based urban planning and policymaking. By quantitatively unraveling the relationships between green infrastructure, traffic density, vegetation coverage, and air quality improvement, the research equips stakeholders with insights crucial for fostering sustainable and liveable urban environments. As cities strive to balance growth with environmental concerns, the findings inform strategies that harness the potential of green infrastructure to pave the way for cleaner, healthier, and more resilient cities across Asia.

C.P. Pow: Our intersecting academic pathways and some of his lasting contributions

C.P. Pow became a significant part of my own academic journey from soon after I joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 1999. Our academic inspirations, interests and identities overlapped, and we had opportunities to co‐teach and co‐write. I use these overlaps and collaborations as a way into reflecting on Pow's work, mainly during the period up to when he received tenure at NUS in 2011. I focus on two substantive themes. The first has to do with how and why Pow approached the landscape of Singapore beyond the visual or the ‘seen’. The second theme concerns the origins, development and consolidation of Pow's contributions to examining urban Asia in ways that unsettle Anglo‐American‐derived generalizations.

Air quality valuation using online surveys in three Asian megacities

Due to worsening air quality across many cities in developing countries, there is an urgent need to consider more aggressive air pollution control measures. Valuation of the benefits of clean air is crucial for establishing the rationale for such policies, but is methodologically challenging, often expensive, and therefore remains limited. This study assesses the potential for more standardized and cost-effective measurement of the demand for air quality improvements, applying a contingent valuation procedure via online surveys, in three Asian megacities facing severe but varying pollution problems – Beijing, Delhi, and Jakarta. The study’s primary contribution is to demonstrate the viability of this approach, which significantly enhances comparability of valuations and their drivers across locations, and thereby has great potential for informing policy analysis and targeting of specific interventions. A second contribution is to supply sorely needed data on the benefits of clean air in these three particular Asian cities, which collectively have a population of about 50 million people. The annual willingness-to-pay for air quality to reach national standards is estimated to be US$150 in Jakarta (where average PM 2.5 concentration, at 45 μ g/m 3 , exceeds national standards by the smallest amount, specifically a factor of 1.3), US$1845 in Beijing (PM 2.5 at 58 μ g/m 3 , 1.7 times the standard), and US$1760 in Delhi (PM 2.5 at 133 μ g/m 3 , 3.3 times the standard). The methods deployed could be applied more widely to construct a worldwide database of comparable air quality valuations. • Online surveys provide a low-cost, replicable way of obtaining air quality valuation estimates. • Air pollution levels in urban Asia are extremely high, but little is known about its costs. • The cost of air pollution is especially high in Beijing and Delhi; and somewhat lower in Jakarta. • Air quality valuations are related to household income, averting expenditures, and household characteristics.

Indoor heat measurement data from low-income households in rural and urban South Asia

Rising temperatures are causing distress across the world, and for those most vulnerable, it is a silent killer. Information about indoor air temperature in residential dwellings is of interest for a range of reasons, such as health, thermal comfort and coping practices. However, there have been only few studies that measure indoor heat exposure, and contrast these to outdoor temperatures in rural-urban areas, of which none are in South Asia. We aim to close this knowledge gap with our indoor and outdoor heat measurement dataset, covering five low-income sites in South Asia. Two sites are in rural areas (Maharashtra, India), while three sites focus on urban areas (Dhaka, Delhi and Faisalabad). Data are based on 206 indoor temperature data loggers and complemented by data from five outdoor automated weather stations. The data-set can be used to examine temperature and humidity variation in low-socioeconomic status households in rural and urban areas and to better understand factors aggravating heat stress. This is important to plan and implement actions for combating heat stress.

Navigating conflicting desires: parenting practices and the meaning of educational work in urban East Asia

ABSTRACT Today parents are faced with increasing expectations to attend to their young children’s learning and cognitive development. South Korea and Singapore are well-known for their competitive education systems and for consistently topping international student assessment tests. They also share an inflated private tuition industry, fuelled by the assumption that parents are compelled to invest substantial resources and time to support their children's development and education. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul and Singapore, the article explores how middle-class parents of pre- and primary school children negotiate seemingly conflicting aspirations of academic achievement versus emotional well-being and resilience. The findings unveil how parents strive to cultivate positive attitudes towards learning through management of time and space in everyday life. In particular, it draws attention to the moral imperative to raise children who enjoy learning, as a way to reconcile parents’ twofold aspiration to upskill their children and cultivate their emotional well-being.

Unfolding the form from within: East and Southeast urban Asia, its postcolonial condition, and its ephemeral architectural ‘displayness’

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to coin a term ‘displayness’ to emphasis the internal form of spatiotemporal display. In contemporary Asia, its displayness is argued to be the critical dynamics. Noticeably, this displayness implies a postcolonial perspective to question contemporary Asia’s complicated built heteroglossia. In other words, due to the inescapable marriage between the external cultural politics and the local essence, the Asian built environment showcases not only a binary identification of these two forces but also an emergent new identity in between, which, arguably, is identifiable of being urban Asian. The commercial exhibitions temporarily built along or within major shopping centres are the examples. This paper intends to face and analyse these temporary and seemingly superficial built objects as representations of the registered historicity of contemporary Asia. This paper analyses selected cases of temporary commercial exhibitions in Singapore and Taiwan which reflect the economic-political intervention into the Asian built environment, both as architectural landmarks and from the collective sense of urbanism. As a methodology, the architectural manifestations delivered as a form of understanding are analysed from the assistance of these temporal exhibitions’ ephemeral character, and this form is argued as a display of contemporary Asia’s postcoloniality reflected through its built historicity.

On the Same Skywalk in a Time of Pandemic: How a vulnerable group copes with the new conditions in Hong Kong

The public space plays a crucial role in providing adequate infrastructure for vulnerable social groups in the context of high-density urban Asia. In this study, a well-known elevated pedestrian network in Hong Kong emerges as a revelatory case for the comparative analysis of the pattern of stationary uses before and after the COVID-19 pandemic out-break. Findings reveal a significant decrease (-20 %) in the total number of users and a shift in the pattern of activities, comprising a significant shrinkage of socially oriented uses and a vast increase of individual behaviors. This study advocates a responsive policymaking that considers the peculiar post-outbreak needs of migrant workers in Hong Kong and in high-density urban Asia

The value of the underground: punk, politics, and creative urbanism in Bandung, Indonesia

ABSTRACT Drawing on my research into the hardcore punk scene in Bandung, Indonesia, I argue for the conceptual and social significance of ‘the underground’ as a form of radical social imagination that continues to creatively reshape urban life in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. I adopt a politics of value approach to understand the underground as a cultural terrain across which multiple struggles over value take place, as well as the role of hardcore punk and other underground scenes in the transformation of creative work, urban space, cultural identities, and political movements. These underground scenes can be understood as sites of precarious, creative autonomy won through struggles over value, in the context of wider processes of class recomposition, urbanization, and generational change. Such scenes constitute shifting communities of creative workers, political activists and urban youth struggling for autonomy. Underground scenes also both contribute to and contest neoliberal forms of urban development, as in the conflicts and compromises associated with the implementation of ‘Creative City’ policies in Bandung. In doing so, these scenes draw on practices from global underground networks and local informal economies to develop new ways of organizing cultural production. Thus, I argue that the evidence from Bandung demonstrates that there remains significant value in the concept of ‘the underground’ for understanding the interfaces of cultural production, spatial organization, and political struggle in urban Southeast Asia.

Can people on low incomes access affordable housing loans in urban Africa and Asia? Examples of innovative housing finance models from Reall’s global network

While delivering decent, affordable housing at scale is essential to global sustainable development, one formidable blockage is a lack of accessible housing finance for end users. People on low incomes have been perceived by lenders as high risk. They are excluded from financial systems and are forced to self-build using informal credit at exorbitant rates. This article engages with this problem, discussing practical examples and potential ways forward. It does so through case studies of models from Reall (a UK-based international development organization and social enterprise that promotes affordable homes) and its partner organizations in India, the Philippines, Nepal, Mozambique and Pakistan. The article evaluates the strengths and limitations of these models, and their potential for scaling up. Reall’s partners demonstrate that decent houses can be delivered at a cost that is accessible for potential low-income homeowners, while proving the viability of lending to borrowers in the bottom of the income pyramid. This is essential for demonstrating the commercial viability and impactful investment opportunity represented by affordable housing in urban Africa and Asia.

Youth politics in urban Asia: an introduction

This introduction explores the changing relationship between ‘youth’ and ‘politics’, and the entanglements between youth politics and urban space in Asia. This is a timely inquiry, given the recent...

The Contingencies of Transnational Air-conditioning Histories

This essay explores the technopolitical and sociotechnical contingencies of the transnational histories of air-conditioning in urban Asia. It interrogates the mainstream technocentric and technologically-determinist understanding of air-conditioning, energy use and climate change by challenging its climatic determinism, diffusionist account of globalization, and understanding of architecture as mere energy conduit. In place of these assumptions, this essay argues that thermal comfort depends on not just climatic variables but also on social practices and cultural norms. It also understands the globalization of air-conditioning technologies as consisting not of diffusionist processes that replicate universal forms but of context-specific translations whereby “universal” forms mutate. Lastly, this essay sees architecture as having material agencies that entangle with thermal comfort and energy in complex manners.