Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:
Part 1: Traditions -- Anointed cities: The incremental urbanism of Hindu India -- Cultivating cultural memory: observing ethnic transitions in Inner Mongolia -- The paradise between two worlds: rereading Taj Mahal and its environs -- Vernacular shifts: observing dwelling patterns in Anatolian Turkey -- Axes and alleywalls: the tradition of duality in contemporary Korean cities -- The cultural construction of Surakarta, Java -- The new Old City: nostalgia, representation and gentrification in historic Damascus -- The death and life of traditional aquatic settlements in central Thailand.

Part II: Tensions -- Tensions manifested: reading the Viceroy's house -- Macau paradox: post colonial Portugese-Chinese urban manifestations -- Le Corbusier's ruin: the changing face of Chandigarh' capitol -- High dreams and stark realities: reading Islamadad -- An (almost) all-American city: the vision and legacy of the Tehran comprehensive plan -- The dilemmas of conservation and reconstruction in Beirut -- Manifesting democracy: public space and the search for identity in post-war Japan -- The post-colonial unconscious: observing mega-imagistic urban projects in Asia.

PART III: Transformations -- Global architecture and ethnic enclaves: reading Kuala Lumpur's city centre -- Making way for global metropolis: Mumbai's rapidly transforming informal sector -- From handshake buildings to golf villas: how the flash cities of Manchester and Shenzhen came of age -- Reshaping Hong Kong: Dimensions of change in a compact city -- Building utopias: China's emerging new town movement -- Vertical urbanism, horizontal urbanity: notes from east Asian cities -- The museum of economic catalyst: Abu Dhabi's new cultural district -- The Dubai effect': the Gulf, the art world and globalization

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.