What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers' comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book's point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

The NUS Architecture Folio series highlights the current developments of contemporary Asian architectural education and debate. "Folio" deals with global and local architectural issues in an accessible way, and brings topical issues into in-depth discussion and discourse among architecture professionals, teachers and research scholars in Asia and around the world. In "Folio 06", we feature renowned architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who are the inaugural Distinguished Visitors of the NUS Ong Siew May Professors. They conducted design studios in Singapore. Also, in "Folio 06", scholars such as John Habraken, Alberto Perez-Gomez and Jonathan Hill explore their recent research at NUS, while Heng Chye Kiang, Ruzica Bozovic-Stamenovic and Li Xiaodong reflect on their respective designs that have won awards. Grounded in Asia, the "Folio" series strives to reach beyond its geographical location in theoretical and practical explorations of architecture.

"Li Shiqiao reveals continuities between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations where others see only rupture and chaos. No other work on the staggering urban explosion in China so deftly displays the complexities of these current formulations. Bringing an impressive array of disciplines into conversation with each other, this book gestures toward what urban studies could and should be." - Professor Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton "Asked what was the difference between Japanese space and 'western' space, Maki declared emphatically: 'Nothing ' Tackling differences in spatial thinking from inside both 'western' and Chinese thinking, Li Shiqiao demonstrates how mental space, Chinese and 'western, ' is determined by culture." - Professor Leon van Schaik, RMIT University "Li Shiqiao has written the only book on the Chinese city that captures at once the accelerated hypermodernity of the Shanghai stock exchange and 2500 years of Daoist and Confucian culture. It will be a classic." - Professor Scott Lash Goldsmiths College, University of London This book teaches us to read the contemporary Chinese city. Li Shiqiao deftly crafts a new theory of the Chinese city and the dynamics of urbanization by: examining how the Chinese city has been shaped by the figuration of the writing system analyzing the continuing importance of the family and its barriers of protection against real and imagined dangers exploring the meanings of labour, and the resultant numerical and financial hierarchies demonstrating how actual structures bring into visual being the conceptions of numerical distributions, safety networks, and aesthetic orders. Understanding the Chinese City elegantly traces a thread between ancient Chinese city formations and current urban organizations, revealing hidden continuities that show how instrumental the past has been in forming the present. It contextualizes Chinese urban experiences in relation to familiar intellectual landmarks. Rather than becoming obstacles to change, ancient practices have become effective strategies of adaptation under radically new terms.