Events

CALL FOR PROPOSALS DEADLINE: 29 MAY 2026

Southeast Asia (SEA) has been, and remains, fertile ground for research that unsettles any neat dichotomy of city versus non-city, and association of urbanization only with the former. This has given rise to work on the urban beyond the city, most famously “desakota” (McGee, 1991). What other concepts, terms or ideas emerge from the region alongside (or perhaps in the shadow of) desakota? Where specifically have these terms emerged from and where (beyond as well as within the region) have they travelled to? How does Southeast Asia relate to the wider traffic in ideas around burgeoning literatures on planetary urbanization and planetary ruralization? These are the overarching questions that frame this urban/rural studies workshop on the making and mobility of concepts from Southeast Asia.

Besides desakota, other longstanding concepts engaging urbanization beyond the territorial confines of the city include (but are not limited to) “agropolitan” (Friedmann and Douglass, 1978), “megapolitan” (Yunus, 2006), “mega-urban region” (Jones, 2002) and “thoroughgoing urbanization” (Jones, 1997). More recently, not only has desakota been reinvigorated and travelled intra-regionally (from Indonesia to the Philippines as “desakota 2.0” – Ortega, 2020), but “kampungkota” (Kusno, 2020) has been used to describe the dual development trajectory of “urban villages,” encompassing both long-established kampungs and those newly created through urban “commoning” mainly by the urban poor (Putri 2019). In unsettling conventional socio-spatial mappings of urban and rural, kampungkota is to the city and agglomerations what desakota has been for conceptualization of spatially extended landscapes of urbanization.

Planetary urbanization has not only revived interest in existing concepts from Southeast Asia and spurred their critical reworking but also given rise to new concepts in and beyond the region. Work on “geographies of ruralization” (Gillen et al., 2022), for example, critiques planetary urbanization theory’s conception of unidirectional flows of development towards achieving the state of being entirely urban, including by conceptualizing “extended ruralization” in SEA. A range of other work also considers the rural extending into ostensibly urban spaces, fomenting notions of an “extended agrarian question” (Batubara and Rachman, 2022). Such conceptual contributions of SEA provenance circulate amongst related concepts from elsewhere, notably “agrarian city-making” (Cowan, 2022) in India and the “urban agrarian question” (Jacobs, 2022) in South Africa.

We invite expressions of interest from scholars interested in (re)engaging urban/rural studies concepts that have emerged from SEA, mapping their mobility and uptake elsewhere [such as desakota in China (Xie et al., 2007; Chen et al., 2017)] or examining their relational reworking. This includes, but is not limited to:

1. SEA as a region of historical and ongoing efforts to conceptualize urbanization beyond the city or the rural in the city
2. How concepts derived from SEA have been taken up and developed in other regional contexts
3. Ways in which concepts from elsewhere are, in turn, drawn upon to conceptualize the urban beyond the city in SEA
4. Approaches to studying conceptualization from SEA in comparison or relation to elsewhere
5. Appraisal of conceptual resources and frontiers with respect to urbanization beyond the city, and future prospects

References

– Batubara, B. and Rachman, N.F. 2022. Extended Agrarian Question in Concessionary Capitalism: The Jakarta’s Kaum Miskin Kota. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 11(2): 232-255.
– Chen, Y., Wen, Y. and Li Z. 2017. From blueprint to action: The transformation of the planning paradigm for desakota in China, Cities 60: 454-465.
– Cowan, T. 2022. Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
– Friedmann, J. and Douglass M. 1978. Agropolitan Development: Towards A New Strategy for Regional Planning in Asia. In Growth Pole Strategy and Regional Development Policy, edited by Fu-Chen Lo and Kamal Salih, 163-192. London: Pergamon.
– Gillen, J., Bunnell, T. and Rigg, J. 2022. Geographies of ruralization. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(2): 186-203.
– Jacobs, R. 2022. Land for Livelihoods: Urban Agriculture and the Agrarian Question in the Twenty-First Century. In The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics, edited by Saturnino M. Borras Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., and Jennifer C. Franco, 443-466, Oxford Academic.
– Jones, G. W. 1997. The thoroughgoing urbanisation of East and Southeast Asia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 38(3): 237–249.
– Jones, G.W. 2002. Southeast Asian urbanization and the Growth of Mega-Urban Regions. Journal of Population Research, 19(2): 119-136.
– Kusno, A. 2019. Middling urbanism: the megacity and the kampung. Urban Geography, 41(7): 954–970.
– McGee, T. 1991. The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a hypothesis. In The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia, edited by Norton Ginsburg, Bruce Koppel and T.G. McGee, 3-25. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
– Ortega, A. A. C. 2020. Desakota 2.0: worlding hybrid spaces in the global urban. Urban Geography, 41(5): 668–681.
– Putri, P.W. 2019. Sanitizing Jakarta: decolonizing planning and kampung imaginary. Planning Perspectives, 34(5): 805–825.
– Xie, Y., Batty, M. and Zhao, K. 2007. Simulating Emergent Urban Form Using Agent-Based Modeling: Desakota in the Suzhou-Wuxian Region in China. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(3): 477–495.
– Yunus, S.H. 2006. Megapolitan: Konsep, Problematik, dan Prospek. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar.

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (maximum 300 words), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words) for submission by 29 May 2026. Additionally, please include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere, and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in a special issue. Please submit your proposal using the form available on the website.

Authors of selected proposals will be notified by the end of June 2026. Presenters will be required to submit a draft of their papers (4,000-6,000 words) by 10 August 2026. These papers will be distributed to fellow speakers and chairpersons prior to the workshop and do not need to be fully polished. With a view to publication, we invite presenters to include photographs and other imagery (e.g. stylized representations of patterns of urbanization beyond the city) in their written pieces and presentations.

This workshop will be held in person. Full or partial airfare funding will be offered to overseas participants, as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Please indicate your need for funding support in the proposal form.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Bosman BATUBARA
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Prof Tim BUNNELL
Asia Research Institute & Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Prof Nicholas A. PHELPS
Faculty of Architecture, The University of Melbourne

Dr Andrea ARRATIA-SOLAR
Faculty of Architecture, The University of Melbourne

Prof Stephen CAIRNS
Department of Urban Design, Monash University, Indonesia