Abstract:

In this engagement, I explore two ways to appreciate entangled areas in Southeast Asia through the urban, influenced by relational orientations to spatiality drawn from work in science and technology studies, assemblage urbanism and worlding cities. First, I survey how scholarship on Asian and Southeast Asian urbanisms have long reproduced but have also recently challenged the enduring territorial legacies of area thinking, moving from a view of stable, territorially-bound categories of space as basis for comparative analysis to one of movements, fluidity and interconnections. These shifts carry potentials for developing conceptual vectors oriented towards the coming together of socio-material contingencies that constitute urban areas. Second, I show how the periphery—a key spatial category that pertains to a specific urban site—may be examined as an effect of assemblage. A focus on emergence, contingency and undecidable trajectories destabilizes the fixity of spatial categories as basis for understanding urban areas. I demonstrate how an approach to entangled areas and their material itineraries highlights a multitude of practices, encounters, and co-existence that results in non-predetermined spatial outcomes. Such an approach to urban areas in/of Southeast Asia presents a different starting point for making areal comparisons while being more attuned to the multiple and generative possibilities in space.

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