Description
Book SynopsisThis volume explores how the city and the sea converse and converge in creating new forms of everyday urbanity in archipelagic and island Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from case studies spanning Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and New Caledonia, the volume rethinks the place of the sea in coastal cities, through a mobility-inspired understanding of urbanity itself. How might conceptualisations of contemporary coastal urbanisms be approached from the sea, in ways that complicate singularly terrestrial, fixed framings of the city? What connections, contradictions, and dissonances can be found between sea change and urban change? While addressing these questions, the authors re-centre more marginal voices of those who dwell and work in islanded metropoles, offering new insights on the futures and contested nature(s) of littoral urban transformation.
Trade Review"Breaking down the lines that falsely separate land and sea, city and shore, wet and dry, this carefully collated, beautifully curated text provides critical scholars researching coasts, islands, seas and cities a deep reflection of the intersections, relations and entanglements of these spaces: how the urban and the ocean coalesce, crash, creep, collide and create worlds anew – on and offshore and the spaces between. A must-read text at a moment of climate crisis, rising seas, ecological decline and human response – this volume offers profoundly necessary empirical and theoretical contributions to understanding complex social ecologies in the context of postcolonial histories. It presents a myriad of perspectives often marginalised by mainstream western scholarship, for better grasping, understanding, resisting and struggling against environmental changes in the littoral zones where land and sea meet, mix and meld in urbanities. It also offers empirical specificity to Southeast Asia but is absolutely not a book only for scholars interested in this world region. It is a reminder of the importance of this part of the world, its global reverberations and echoes, and its situated significance. The book cuts across disciplinary lines and perspectives, career stages, institutional geographies, and brings in voices from beyond the conventional academy." – Kimberley Peters, Marine Governance, Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, Germany "Science, technology, and society (STS) work carried out in archipelagic countries should focus more on theorizing littoral spaces. This book is a rare and much needed attempt at theorizing life that is both oceanic and terrestrial, the life that dominates and characterizes human and more-than-human assemblages in archipelagic countries. Maritime STS work in Southeast Asia and elsewhere would, therefore, benefit from this book when it needs to examine the limits and porosity of the maritime world, and the material traffics between the ocean and the hinterland." – Fadjar I. Thufail, National Research and Innovation Agency, Indonesia "This volume charts a significant and vital contribution to the understanding of contemporary urban lifeworlds by the sea. Assembling original scholarship on coastal cities in Southeast Asia, it allows to rethink urbanity through the lens of the coastal." – Lukas Ley, University of Heidelberg, Germany
