The site is designed for educational purpose to share primarily the writings of students who carry out research on and study urban Asia at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Student contributors largely come from an urban Asia course (GY438 Cities and Social Change in East Asia), who have initially produced the blog posts as part of their study assignments. In this regard, this site also serves as the venue for sharing and disseminating the pedagogical outcomes, situating students as knowledge co-producers.
The writings make use of Asia as an empirical terrain to unsettle Western theories and notions of urban development. Various examples of urban policies, practices, and processes are drawn from cities across East and Southeast Asia in particular, aiming to produce critical and evidence-based analyses of the multiple and dynamic urban conditions. It is hoped that this site of public writing could invite as many people as possible to proactively reflect upon our “urban age” in question, with Asia as both an analytic unit and method.
The thematic coverage is broad and interdisciplinary, encompassing all aspects of urban transformation in Asia. Critical in its nature, this site will present detailed analyses on themes related to the dynamic urban political economy, such as speculative urbanism, financialisation, cities of spectacle and mega-events, and the state capitalism at large. It will also pay full attention to social and spatial aspects of Asian urban change, foregrounding reports on urban/land politics, dispossession, gentrification, and cultural practices, among other issues that could present us the contested daily life in the urban process.
Posts are all written in plain English, narrating a moment of the urban process in a city (or region) in Asia. Together with detailed and authentic observations (evidence), each post also contextualises its observations in existing literature on the urban change in a way that could maintain strong audience awareness.
For further information, and for details on how to submit, please get in touch with the editor.
Terms & Conditions
Creative commons
Unless otherwise specified, all Urban Asia Blog posts are published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). This means that you are free to republish them unmodified and properly attributed, with a link to the original article. Please take care with imagery, however, as items may occasionally remain under copyright.
Comments policy
This blog welcomes feedback and comments in accordance with certain guidelines.
Disclaimer
The views expressed on Urban Asia Blog are those of the authors alone. They do not reflect the position of the GY438 Cities and Social Change in East Asia, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
About the editor
Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies, and teaches in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of speculative urbanisation, the politics of redevelopment and displacement, gentrification, housing, the right to the city, and megaevents as urban spectacles, with particular attention to Asian cities. His recent books include Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015), Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016), Anti Gentrification: What is to be Done (in Korean; Dongnyok, 2017) and Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cites and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). His other on-going book projects include a monograph Making China Urban (Routledge), and two edited volumes Exporting Urban Korea? (Routledge) and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia (Routledge).
Contact us
For any further questions about the site, please contact the editor at h.b.shin [at] lse.ac.uk.
How to cite
For those wishing to cite a post, here is a recommended format:
- Hatt, D. (2018) State-led Gentrification? ‘Revitalising’ Hong Kong’s Central Market. Urban Asia Blog URL: https://urbanasia.blog/2018/06/26/daniel-hatt-state-led-gentrification/ 18 June 2018 (Last accessed 2 July 2018).
For those posts which are originally published elsewhere, please cite the details of the original post.
Urban Asia Blog 