The Asian urban landscape contains nearly half of the planet's inhabitants and more than half of its slum population living in some of its oldest and densest cities. It encompasses some of the world's oldest civilizations and colonizations, and today contains some of the world's fastest growing cities and economies. As such Asian cities create concomitant imagery - polarizations of poverty and wealth, blurred lines between formality and informality, and stark juxtapositions of ancient historic places with shimmering new skylines. This book embraces the complexity and ambiguity of the Asian urban landscape, and surveys its bewildering array of multifarious urbanities and urbanisms. Twenty-four essays offer scholarly reflections and positions on the complex forces and issues shaping Asian cities today, looking at why Asian cities are different from the West and whether they are treading a different path to their futures. Their combined narrative - spanning from Turkey to Japan and Mongolia to Indonesia - is framed around three sections: Traditions reflects on indigenous urbanisms and historic places, Tensions reflects on the legacies of Asia's East-West dialectic through both colonialism and modernism and Transformations examines Asia's new emerging utopias and urban aspirations. The book claims that the histories and destinies of cities across various parts of Asia are far too enmeshed to unpack or oversimplify. Avoiding the categorization of Asian cities exclusively by geographic location (south-east, Middle East), or the convenient tagging of the term Asian on selective regional parts of the continent, it takes a broad intellectual view of the Asian urban landscape as a 'both...and' phenomenon; as a series of diverse confluences - geographic, historic and political - extending from the deserts of the Persian Gulf region to the Pearl River Delta. Arguing for Asian cities to be taken seriously on their own terms, this book represents Asia - as a fount of extraordinary knowledge that can challenge our fundamental preconceptions of what cities are and ought to be.

The act of identifying, protecting, restoring, and reusing buildings, districts, and built landscapes of historic and cultural significance is, at its best, a reflective and consequential process of urban and socio-economic reform. It has the potential to reconcile conflicting memories, meanings, and cultural tensions, bridging and expanding the perceived boundaries of multiple disciplines towards bigger aspirations of city-making and social justice. How and where do such aspirations overlap and differ across nations and societies across the world? In places with different histories, governance structures, regulatory stringency, and populist dispositions, who are the specific players, and what are the actual processes that bring about bigger and deeper change beyond just the conservation of an architectural or urban entity of perceived value? This collection of scholarly articles by theorists, academics, and practitioners explores the global complexity, guises, and potential of heritage conservation. Going from Tokyo to Cairo, Shenzhen to Rome, and Delhi to Moscow, this volume examines a vast range of topics - indigenous habitats, urban cores, vernacular infrastructure, colonial towns, squatters, burial sites, war zones, and modern landmarks. It surfaces numerous inherent issues - water stress, deforestation, social oppression, poverty, religion, immigration, and polity, expanding the definitions of heritage conservation as both a professional discipline and socio-cultural catalyst. This book argues that the intellectual and praxis limits of heritage conservation - as the agency of reading, defining, and intervening with built heritage - can be expansive, aimed at bigger positive change beyond a specific subject or object; plural, enmeshed with multiple fields and specializations; and empathetic, born from the actual socio-political realities of a place.

The Asian urban landscape contains nearly half of the planet's inhabitants and more than half of its slum population living in some of its oldest and densest cities. It encompasses some of the world's oldest civilizations and colonizations, and today contains some of the world's fastest growing cities and economies. As such Asian cities create concomitant imagery - polarizations of poverty and wealth, blurred lines between formality and informality, and stark juxtapositions of ancient historic places with shimmering new skylines. This book embraces the complexity and ambiguity of the Asian urban landscape, and surveys its bewildering array of multifarious urbanities and urbanisms. Twenty-four essays offer scholarly reflections and positions on the complex forces and issues shaping Asian cities today, looking at why Asian cities are different from the West and whether they are treading a different path to their futures. Their combined narrative - spanning from Turkey to Japan and Mongolia to Indonesia - is framed around three sections: Traditions reflects on indigenous urbanisms and historic places, Tensions reflects on the legacies of Asia's East-West dialectic through both colonialism and modernism and Transformations examines Asia's new emerging utopias and urban aspirations. The book claims that the histories and destinies of cities across various parts of Asia are far too enmeshed to unpack or oversimplify. Avoiding the categorization of Asian cities exclusively by geographic location (south-east, Middle East), or the convenient tagging of the term Asian on selective regional parts of the continent, it takes a broad intellectual view of the Asian urban landscape as a 'both...and' phenomenon; as a series of diverse confluences - geographic, historic and political - extending from the deserts of the Persian Gulf region to the Pearl River Delta. Arguing for Asian cities to be taken seriously on their own terms, this book represents Asia - as a fount of extraordinary knowledge that can challenge our fundamental preconceptions of what cities are and ought to be.

The act of identifying, protecting, restoring, and reusing buildings, districts, and built landscapes of historic and cultural significance is, at its best, a reflective and consequential process of urban and socio-economic reform. It has the potential to reconcile conflicting memories, meanings, and cultural tensions, bridging and expanding the perceived boundaries of multiple disciplines towards bigger aspirations of city-making and social justice. How and where do such aspirations overlap and differ across nations and societies across the world? In places with different histories, governance structures, regulatory stringency, and populist dispositions, who are the specific players, and what are the actual processes that bring about bigger and deeper change beyond just the conservation of an architectural or urban entity of perceived value? This collection of scholarly articles by theorists, academics, and practitioners explores the global complexity, guises, and potential of heritage conservation. Going from Tokyo to Cairo, Shenzhen to Rome, and Delhi to Moscow, this volume examines a vast range of topics - indigenous habitats, urban cores, vernacular infrastructure, colonial towns, squatters, burial sites, war zones, and modern landmarks. It surfaces numerous inherent issues - water stress, deforestation, social oppression, poverty, religion, immigration, and polity, expanding the definitions of heritage conservation as both a professional discipline and socio-cultural catalyst. This book argues that the intellectual and praxis limits of heritage conservation - as the agency of reading, defining, and intervening with built heritage - can be expansive, aimed at bigger positive change beyond a specific subject or object; plural, enmeshed with multiple fields and specializations; and empathetic, born from the actual socio-political realities of a place.

Urbanism Beyond 2020 explores numerous questions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic: Why is city making a health project? How are ecological and human wellbeing interrelated? How can leadership and governance help bridge gaps in our unjust cities? How might we renew our relationship with dwellings and neighbourhoods? How resilient and adaptable are our cities during uncertain times? Amidst climate change and global warming, is the pandemic a prelude to the challenges to come? Addressed to anyone invested in the well-being of our cities, this collection of essays by an accomplished urban designer and city planner reminds us why the pointers to our future will not emerge exclusively from affluent nations or less developed societies alone, why we live in an interconnected world, and why this pandemic is a crucial period to reexamine the impact of our cities on our planet's future.

Offers a comprehensive survey of affordable housing across the world. Presents numerous case-studies and best-practices on affordable housing design. Presents clear and concise strategies on how to make cities more affordable and inclusive. Offers interviews and conversations with globally known figures in progressive architecture and city planning. How are efforts at making cities more inclusive and equitable playing out across nations and societies, with different governance structures and varying political circumstances? How is affordable housing bridging economic gaps across different social and cultural geographies? This collection of fifty essays and case studies engages in these important questions and explores a wide array of strategies and approaches, extracting their overlaps and contrasts. It features interviews with influential administrators and planners such as Somsook Boonyabancha (Thailand), and Jaime Lerner (Brazil). It showcases projects by globally known architects and urbanists such as MVRDV (The Netherlands), and Alejandro Aravena (Chile). And it offers discussions on uplifting the base of the economic pyramid through low-income and slum-upgradation projects in Mali, Venezuela, Bogota, Myanmar, and Pune. This volume is not only an invaluable resource for architects and planners interested in the design of affordable housing, but for anyone interested in the global multiplicity and complexity of urban affordability, liveability and social justice.

This volume examines the multifarious dimensions that constitute the workings of the Hindu temple as an architectural and urban built form. Eleven chapters reflect on Hindu temples from multiple standpoints - tracing their elusive evolution from wayside shrines as well as canonization into classical objects; questioning the role of treatises containing their building rules; analyzing their prescribed proportions and orders; examining their presence in, and as, larger sacred habitats and ritualistic settings; and affirming their influential role in the contemporary Indian metropolis.Going beyond stereotypical presentations of Hindu temples dominated by chronological and stylistic themes, this study, addressed to architects, urbanists, and builders, combines historic scholarship, documentation, personal observations and fieldwork to expand the idea of the Hindu temple as a complex and contradictory cultural entity, that is both formal and informal, monumental and modest, historic and modern, and deserving of a far broader and deeper understanding.