Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia

Abstract

While Southeast Asia revolves around its cities, scholarship spins off into disciplines that ignore this fact. In a region that has known cities for two millennia, where even remote peoples have shaped themselves to or against urban rule, research goes on as if the city were an alien entity, easily factored out and best forgotten. So village studies represent these city-centred nations, and few wonder if the entrepreneurs and middle class who now explain so much might themselves be explained as urban. Our disciplines divide so deeply that no one addresses how the city organizes society and shapes the region.