Introduction: Doing Asian cities

Abstract

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 only be derived from sustained ethnographic examination of cities in all their diversity. Relatedly, we cast Asia as a frontier for ethnographic strategizing – where, rather than merely importing and applying methodological tools from elsewhere, new ways of ‘doing’ cities emerge from reflexive engagement with emergent urban forms and ways of life. Considering diverse urban contexts in Asia, we foreground the aspirational dynamics of cities and ethnographic approaches to studying them. This has produced findings that have pushed the theoretical understanding of aspirations beyond Arjun Appadurai’s initial formulations in three ways. First, breaking from the dichotomy of pastness and cultural futures, the authors have found pastness making up important ingredients for aspirations. Second, the urban middle classes could very well express subaltern aspirations for and with subaltern groups, and it would be a mistake for us to ignore the sense and sensibility of the middle classes on account of their purported lack of subalternity. Third, the capacity to aspire is primarily achieved in the embodied production of space and limited by the same.