Future Asian Space

Future Asian Space
Author: Erwin Viray
Publisher: NUS Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9971695960

Rapid technological, economic, social and cultural changes are transforming the idea of "Asian space." With the shift to a global economy and an urban population explosion, Asian cities have become a mainstay of progress, national pride, identity, and positioning on the global stage. The extraordinary pace and intensity of the changes have created a situation unique in the history of urban development. Despite the immense diversity of Asian countries, "Asia-ness" is often treated as a distinctive quality that has emerged from unique recent circumstances affecting Asian urbanizations as a whole. In Future Asian Space, 15 authors explore broad concepts relating to the creation and re-creation of "Asian space" and contemporary Asian identity, and their examination of different sites and research approaches highlights the difficulty of pinpointing what Asia-ness is, or might become. Appropriate design and planning of cities is a critical element in building a sustainable future and coping with environmental, social and cultural problems. Future Asian Space is designed to stimulate interests and engagement in discussions of the Asian city, and its trajectories in architecture and urbanism, but the authors' conclusions will intrigue anyone interested in the future of cities and urban life in Asia.

Asian Space Race: Rhetoric or Reality?

Asian Space Race: Rhetoric or Reality?
Author: Ajey Lele
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012-10-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 8132207327

This book explores the character and contours of the Asian Space Powers. At present, Asian states like China, Japan and India are found investing in space technologies with analogous social and scientific and probably with divergent military intents. Other Asian states like Israel, South Korea and Malaysia are also making investments in the space arena. States like Iran and North Korea are faulted for using space launches as a demonstrative tool to achieve strategic objectives. This work examines this entire maze of activities to unearth where these states are making these investments to accomplish their state-specific goal or are they also trying to surpass each other by engaging in competition. Explaining why and how these states are making investments towards achieving their socio-economic and strategic mandate this book infers that the possibility of Asian Space Race exists but is presently fairly diminutive.

Asia's Space Race

Asia's Space Race
Author: James Clay Moltz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-12-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231527578

In contrast to the close cooperation practiced among European states, space relations among Asian states have become increasingly tense. If current trends continue, the Asian civilian space competition could become a military race. To better understand these emerging dynamics, James Clay Moltz conducts the first in-depth policy analysis of Asia's fourteen leading space programs, concentrating especially on developments in China, Japan, India, and South Korea. Moltz isolates the domestic motivations driving Asia's space actors, revisiting critical events such as China's 2007 antisatellite weapons test and manned flights, Japan's successful Kaguya lunar mission and Kibo module for the International Space Station (ISS), India's Chandrayaan lunar mission, and South Korea's astronaut visit to the ISS, along with plans to establish independent space-launch capability. He investigates these nations' divergent space goals and their tendency to focus on national solutions and self-reliance rather than regionwide cooperation and multilateral initiatives. He concludes with recommendations for improved intra-Asian space cooperation and regional conflict prevention. Moltz also considers America's efforts to engage Asia's space programs in joint activities and the prospects for future U.S. space leadership. He extends his analysis to the relationship between space programs and economic development in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, making this a key text for international relations and Asian studies scholars.

'City of the Future'

'City of the Future'
Author: Mateusz Laszczkowski
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2016-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785332570

Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

Asian Designs

Asian Designs
Author: Saadia M. Pekkanen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501706764

Asian nations are no longer "rising" powers in the world order; they have risen. How will they conduct themselves in world politics? How will they deploy their considerable and growing power individually and collectively? These questions are critical for global governance. Conventional wisdom claims that, lacking in institutions that accumulate and coordinate the massive economic and growing military strength of Asian nations, the Asian region will continue to punch below its weight in world politics; thin and patchy institutionalization results in political weakness. In Asian Designs, Saadia M. Pekkanen and her collaborators question and provide evidence on these core assumptions of Western scholarship. The book advances a new framework for debate and sophisticated examinations of institutional arrangements for several major issue areas in the world order—security, trade, environment, and public health.

Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity

Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity
Author: Joanne Punzo Waghorne
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811003858

This book discusses Asia’s rapid pace of urbanization, with a particular focus on new spaces created by and for everyday religiosity. The essays in this volume – covering topics from the global metropolises of Singapore, Bangalore, Seoul, Beijing, and Hong Kong to the regional centers of Gwalior, Pune, Jahazpur, and sites like Wudang Mountain – examine in detail the spaces created by new or changing religious organizations that range in scope from neighborhood-based to consciously global. The definition of “spatial aspects” includes direct place-making projects such as the construction of new religious buildings – temples, halls and other meeting sites, as well as less tangible religious endeavors such as the production of new “mental spaces” urged by spiritual leaders, or the shift from terra firma to the strangely concrete effervesce of cyberspace. With this in mind, it explores how distinct and blurred, and open and bounded communities generate and participate in diverse practices as they deliberately engage or disengage with physical landscapes/cityscapes. It highlights how through these religious organizations, changing class and gender configurations, ongoing political and economic transformations, continue as significant factors shaping and affecting Asian urban lives. In addition, the books goes further by exploring new and often bittersweet “improvements” like metro rail lines, new national highways, widespread internet access, that bulldoze – both literally and figuratively – religious places and force relocations and adjustments that are often innovative and unexpected. Furthermore, this volume explores personal experiences within the particularities of selected religious organizations and the ways that subjects interpret or actively construct urban spaces. The essays show, through ethnographically and historically grounded case studies, the variety of ways newly emerging religious communities or religious institutions understand, value, interact with, or strive to ignore extreme urbanization and rapidly changing built environments.

Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts

Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts
Author: Ah Eng Lai
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2013
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9814380474

This volume makes an important and unique contribution to scholarly understandings of migration and diversity through its focus on Asian contexts. Current scholarship and literature on processes of migration and the consequences of diversity is heavily concentrated on Western contexts and their concerns with "multiculturalism," "integration," "rights and responsibilities," "social cohesion," "social inclusion," and "cosmopolitanism." In contrast, there has been relatively little attention given to migration and growing diversity in Asian contexts which are constituted by highly distinct and varied histories, cultures, geographies, and political economies. This book fills this significant gap in the literature on migration studies with a concentrated focus on communities, cities and countries in the Asian region that are experiencing increased levels of population mobility and subsequent diversity. Not only does it offer analyses of the policies and processes of migration, it also addresses the outcomes and implications of migration and diversity - these include a focus on multiculturalism and citizenship in the Asian region, the emerging complex forms of governance in response to increased diversity, discussions of different settlement experiences, and the practices of everyday life and encounters in increasingly diverse locales.

Japan’s Pan-Asian Empire

Japan’s Pan-Asian Empire
Author: Seok-Won Lee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000334430

This book is a study of how the theories and actual practices of a Pan-Asian empire were produced during Japan’s war, 1931–1945. As Japan invaded China and conducted a full-scale war against the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s, several versions of a Pan-Asian empire were presented by Japanese intellectuals, in order to maximize wartime collaboration and mobilization in China and the colonies. A broad group of social scientists – including Rōyama Masamichi, Kada Tetsuji, Ezawa Jōji, Takata Yasuma, and Shinmei Masamichi – presented highly politicized visions of a new Asia characterized by a newly shared Asian identity. Critically examining how Japanese social scientists contrived the logic of a Japan-led East Asian community, Part I of this book demonstrates the violent nature of imperial knowledge production which buttresses colonial developmentalism. In Part II, the book also explores questions around the (re)making of colonial Korea as part of Japan’s regional empire, generating theoretical and realistic tensions between resistance and collaboration. Japan’s Pan-Asian Empire provides original theoretical perspectives on the construction of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire. It will appeal to students and scholars of modern Japanese history, colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as Korean studies.

Art in the Asia-Pacific

Art in the Asia-Pacific
Author: Larissa Hjorth
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-02-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317935721

As social, locative, and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, this volume interrogates how this phenomenon impacts art practice and politics. Contributors bring together the worlds of art and media culture to rethink their intersections in light of participatory social media. By focusing upon the Asia-Pacific region, they seek to examine how regionalism and locality affect global circuits of culture. The book also offers a set of theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for thinking about contemporary art practice more generally.

Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia

Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia
Author: Larissa Hjorth
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317684974

While a decade ago much of the discussion of new media in Asia was couched in Occidental notions of Asia as a "default setting" for technology in the future, today we are seeing a much more complex picture of contesting new media practices and production. As "new media" becomes increasingly an everyday reality for young and old across Asia through smartphones and associated devices, boundaries between art, new media, and the everyday are transformed. This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region’s new media. Through an interdisciplinary revision of both "new media" and "Asia" the contributors provide new insights into the complex and contesting terrains of both notions. The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia will be the definitive publication for readers interested in comprehending all the various aspects of new media in Asia. It provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, conceptually cutting-edge guide to the important aspects of new media in the region — as the first point of consultation for researchers, advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields of new media and Asian studies.