Asian Cities: Colonial to Global

This seminar and book presentation is intended to give a snapshot of some current research into the Asian urban environment taken from a number of interrelated and multidisciplinary perspectives. Speakers include Dr. Minna Valjakka, currently an affiliated fellow at IIAS, who is investigating translocal site-responsiveness in Chinese urban creativity, Dr. Cai Liangwan and Dr. Lin Feng, both from Tianjin University and currently on UKNA secondments to TU Delft’s faculty of architecture. Their papers are entitled ‘The Phenomenon and Features of Ancient Chinese Cities and Architecture as Affected by the Oriental Conception of Space-Time’ and ‘The Path in Chinese Classical Gardens – An Interpretation from a Phenomenology of Perception’. Dr. Zinan Hu, also from Tianjin University and an UKNA affiliate, will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Care and Skill: Manufacturing and Poetry in Modern Construction’. The event is being organised by Dr Ir Gregory Bracken, who is an assistant professor of architecture theory at TU Delft. He will be presenting the main arguments contained in Asian Cities: Colonial to Global (Amsterdam University Press, 2015) which investigates why some of the cities of Asia have taken such a lead in the twenty-first century and asks if this is due to the fact that some of them have made clever use of infrastructure inherited from the era of Western colonial expansion.

Book presentation of: Asian Cities: Colonial to Global, Gregory Bracken (editor), Amsterdam University Press (2015), 381 pages, notes, selected bibliography, index, € 99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-90-8964-931-7