Future Challenges of Cities in Asia (eBook)

Gregory Bracken is an Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at TU Delft and one of the co-founders of Footprint, the e-journal dedicated to architecture theory. From 2009-2015 he was a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) Leiden where he set up (with Dr. Manon Ossewijer) the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) with a grant from Marie Curie Actions. His publications include Asian Cities: Colonial to Global (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), and The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Vanishing Urban Vernacular (Routledge 2013, translated into Chinese in 2015).Paul Rabé is academic coordinator of the cities cluster at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands, which includes two networks of urban scholars: the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) and the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET). In addition, Paul is Senior Land Expert at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he heads the Urban Land Governance team. He is a political scientist by training, with a doctoral degree in policy, planning and development from the University of Southern California's Sol Price School of Public Policy. Paul's motivation is to bridge the divide between academia and practice when it comes to our approaches to cities. His engagement is in both worlds: he has over 20 years of experience in advisory work and capacity building as well as research and teaching on urban policy topics. His research and professional interests focus on urban land governance and access to land for social, economic and environmental uses. His current focus is on the intersection of land policy and the management of water resources in urban and peri-urban areas.Dr. R. Parthasarathy is a MEGA Chair Professor and Director, Gujarat Institute of Development Research. He has both teaching and research interests. Until recently, he was teaching at CEPT University to Postgraduate and Graduate students, besides guiding Masters and PhD dissertations. In his research, he explores relations between resources management and social distributions of power, leadership, economic development and the impacts of policy and development organizations on these relations. In all these, the special focus has been on large scale infrastructures in rural and urban areas. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He has co-authored and co-edited books and has published extensively.Neha Sami studies urban and regional development and governance in post-liberalization India. Her research focuses on the governance arrangements of mega-projects, regional planning, and on environmental governance questions in Indian cities, particularly around issues of climate change adaptation. Neha is currently faculty at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, India where she teaches on questions of governance and sustainability as well as anchors the Research Programme. She also serves on the Editorial Collective of Urbanisation. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Mumbai. Dr Bing Zhang is the Chief Planner of the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design and Adjunct Professor at Tongji and Tianjin Universities. He chairs the Academic Committee of Historic City Conservation, Urban Planning Society of China. He has a series of outstanding works in urban and regional planning, including a number of books and more than 70 papers on Theory and History, Heritage Conservation and Strategic Planning. In 2012-2016, as a Pilot Researcher, Bing Zhang has been involved in the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) and was a visiting scholar at the TU Delft in 2012, at the Development Planning Unit, UCL, in 2013, and at ENSAPB in Paris in 2015.

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The ten essays in *Future Challenges of Cities in Asia* engage with some of the most critical urban questions of the near future across Asia. These comprise socio-economic and cultural transitions as a result of urbanization; environmental challenges, especially questions of climate change, natural disasters, and environmental justice; and the challenges of urban infrastructure, built form, and new emerging types of urban settlements. The essays demonstrate that it is increasingly difficult to conceptualize the 'urban' as one particular type of settlement. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that the 'urban' characterizes a global transition in the way we are beginning to think about settlements. This book is of interest not only to researchers interested in comparative and inter-disciplinary research, but also to urban practitioners more broadly, illustrating through concrete cases the challenges that urban regions in Asia and beyond are facing, and the various opportunities that exist for dealing with these challenges.