New Urban-Rural Relations and Resilience in Asian City-Regions: Multidisciplinary and Multi-scalar Perspectives

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The rapid expansion of Asian cities and the urbanization of rural landscapes and communities presents new challenges for research on sustainable development. The comparative frameworks and individual case studies described in this panel collectively illustrate how collaborations and thinking across disciplines, and engagement between action and scholarship, deepens our understanding of Asia’s urbanization and its global implications. In particular, the panelists address the utility of resilience as a critical-analytical concept as well as a normative guide for development. Drawing on the perspectives of Anthropology, Architecture, Environmental Science, Landscape Architecture, Law, Political Economy, Sociology, and Urban Planning and Design, the papers address community-scale urban and rural experience as well as metropolitan and regional policy and design. Cross-cutting themes include the spatial and time-scales of social self-organization and governance that generate spatial settlement forms; the developmental implications of population densities that over long histories have created deeply coupled human and natural systems; and the role and meaning of community – both as an emergent phenomenon as well as a socio-spatial unit of governance – in the process of urbanization. Panel authors are all participants in University of Washington-based/connected research collaborations: this is intentional, as the panel is designed to demonstrate the multidisciplinary nature of social-ecological systems research as well as the work of an emerging institutionally-based partnership between the area studies centers of the Jackson School of International Studies and the professional units of the College of Built Environments.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Daniel B. Abramson, University of Washington

Chair

• Daniel B. Abramson, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• Messy Urbanism? Self-Organized Cities and Social Resilience in Asia - Jeffrey B. Hou, University of Washington

• The Struggle to Contain: History of Deruralization in Chandigarh - Vikramaditya Prakash, University of Washington

• How Community Leaders Mediate Policy Implementation, Community Development, and Environmental Change in Southwest China - John Aloysius Zinda, Brown University

• A Long View of Sustainable Development in the Chengdu Plain, China - Susan H. Whiting, University of Washington

Discussant

• Mike Douglass, National University of Singapore