Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities

• Main Authors: Kong, Lily, Law, Lisa
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Landscape; Public space; Urban area; Asia; Asian Studies; Human Geography; Urban Studies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1798; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3055/viewcontent/ContestedLandscapesAsianCities_2002.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

A decade and a half after Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) wrote their seminal piece on ‘new’ cultural geography, the discipline of geography has experienced a ‘cultural’ turn. Economic geography, for instance, has been infleected through perspectives that take on board cultural retheorisations (see Thrift and Olds, 1996; Thrift, 2000). Within urban studies, the acknowledgement of culture’s powers is not new (see, for example, Agnew et al., 1984). Yet, geographers scrutinising urban landscapes have moved the field, using some of the retheorised perspectives that Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) encapsulated. Of most pertinence to this volume is the retheorised notion of culture which takes into consideration contestations between groups, evident in city contexts—for example, in the imposition and demolition of monuments, the struggle for public space and its meanings, and the appropriation and transformation of landscapes and significations from the dominant culture by subordinate groups as forms of resistance. A body of writings has since developed which acknowledges that cultures and landscapes (including urban landscapes) are politically contested.