Contemporary Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West
Channel: Asian Studies
Date: 2021-04-29

An online interactive lecture by Gregory Bracken.
24 March, 11:00 - 12:00 a.m. 

The Lecture
This lecture highlights the key points from a series of essays examining urban life in Asia and the West, highlighting the problems and opportunities of places like Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul, and Yokahama, as well as India and the United States.

It will introduce the key concepts contained in a series of essays examining urban communities and societies in Asia and the West. The essays highlight issues that have emerged as the world experiences its new urban turn (as now more than 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas). One of the main messages of this collection is to point out that an urbanized world should be an improving place, one that is better to live in, a place where humans can flourish. These essays examine contemporary practices of what is termed ‘care of the self’ in cities in Asia and the West, including challenges to citizenship and even the right to the city itself. Written by a range of academics with different backgrounds (from architecture and urbanism, anthropology, social science, psychology, gender studies, history, and philosophy), their trans- and multidisciplinary approaches shed valuable light on what are sometimes quite old problems, leading to fresh perspectives and new ways of dealing with them. One thing that unites all of these papers is their people-centred approach, because, after all, a city is its people.

The Speaker
Dr Ir. Gregory Bracken is from Ireland and worked as an architect in Europe and Southeast Asia before becoming an Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at TU Delft. He co-founded Footprint, the e-journal dedicated to architecture theory, and from 2009-2015 was a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) Leiden where he co-founded the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) with a €1.2 million grant from Marie Curie Actions. He is also a best-selling author whose works include the Walking Tour series of architectural guides to cities in Asia and Europe as well academic books and articles, including Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West, Asian Cities: Colonial to Global, and The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Vanishing Urban Vernacular.