Journals

This special issue seeks to highlight the ways in which diverse Asian cities – Mumbai,Seoul, Singapore – exceed current urban theorization. Modest, but nonetheless more-than-local re-theorization, can proceed from such empirical excess, which itself can onlybe derived from sustained ethnographic examination of cities in all their diversity.Relatedly, we cast Asia as a frontier for ethnographic strategizing – where, ratherthan merely importing and applying methodological tools from elsewhere, new waysof ‘doing’ cities emerge from reflexive engagement with emergent urban forms and waysof life. Considering diverse urban contexts in Asia, we foreground the aspirationaldynamics of cities and ethnographic approaches to studying them. This has producedfindings that have pushed the theoretical understanding of aspirations beyond ArjunAppadurai’s initial formulations in three ways. First, breaking from the dichotomy ofpastness and cultural futures, the authors have found pastness making up importantingredients for aspirations. Second, the urban middle classes could very well expresssubaltern aspirations for and with subaltern groups, and it would be a mistake for us toignore the sense and sensibility of the middle classes on account of their purported lackof subalternity. Third, the capacity to aspire is primarily achieved in the embodiedproduction of space and limited by the same.

From ARI co-organised workshop “Doing Asian Cities: A Workshop on Urban Aspirations”, 5-6 June 2012.