Events

This workshop is co-organized by the Asia Research Institute and the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET) of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). SEANNET is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation as a four-year initiative (2017-2020) that comprises research, teaching and dissemination of knowledge on urban Asia through the perspective of the neighbourhood. (https://www.ukna.asia/seannet).

Many aspects of urban experience — including those of history, heritage, urban populations, ways of life and livelihoods — are defined and shaped at the neighbourhood level.  Yet, much of it remains overlooked by policy makers and by most Urban Studies academics. The city is often the unit of analysis and boundaries of data collection, while the social constructions of the city, given the relatively incomplete top-down role of the state, are mostly from the neighbourhoods. The story of Asian cities remains however largely recounted by dominant actors in urban redevelopment (i.e. central governments and real estate developers) or by “scientific” knowledge developed in state-sanctioned vocational education institutions like architecture or city planning programs.

“Building City Knowledge from Neighbourhoods” workshop in July 2020 is an invitation to consider the relationship between the city and its neighbourhoods. The notion of “neighbourhood”, here, is linked to its reference both to built and social environments. It corresponds to the smallest social unit for urban place-making, a dimension that John Friedmann (2009) synthesizes as “a small urban space that is cherished by the people who inhabit it.” This definition focuses on three main criteria: its small scale, its inhabited dimension and its local attachment and appropriations by residents. It can be seen both as an intimate place of social encounters and a field of expression of social forces, which is practiced – and thus performed – on a daily basis.

As such, neighbourhoods generate local centralities in the city they belong to. Many aspects of the urban experience – ways of life and livelihoods, heritage preservation, organizing for local amenities like parks, and keeping local areas safe – are initiated, organized and sustained at the neighbourhood level. Neighbourhood activists are often part of a larger city learning and cooperative networks that work to support community gardens and food security, housing rights, and a number of critical issues central to cities.

By shifting the analysis to the neighbourhood scale and titling the workshop “City Building Knowledge” we want to move scholarship and research on two fronts. First, we need to think about city building knowledge at a pedagogical and methodological level. It comes from an awareness that our knowledge of the city obscures the deep layer of knowledge(s) which exists at the neighbourhood scale. The process of obscurity may be driven by several factors. Metropolitan political processes aggregate local viewpoints and obscure the local basis of collective action and of local needs and propensities. The urban economy articulates global tendencies and make invisible the livelihoods and the services which are produced at the local level and of the local organization which supports such livelihoods. A city’s culture is more often than not articulated by its tourism agencies and heavily oriented towards consumerism. Such forms of place marketing obscure the local roots of urban ways of life. We argue that the neighbourhood as a self-governing, identity creating, norm supporting, and livelihood reinforcing set of supportive networks, must exist as a counter narrative to dominant modes of city knowledge production. Second, and stemming from the first point, we want to examine processes and amenity creation at the neighbourhood scale and see the ways these add to city politics, economy and culture. In this sense, knowledge and reputation about the city is traced back to the city’s local areas. Advancing research on both fronts require that we prioritize the horizontal relationships and networks which strengthen local capacities.

Participation in the closed-door workshop is limited and by invitation only. 
Kindly forward all enquiries to Ms Valerie Yeo at valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Hae Young Yun | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Assoc Prof Kong Chong Ho | Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore
Dr Rita Padawangi | Singapore University of Social Sciences
Dr Paul Rabé | International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University