Description

The 21st century will be an urban century, one in which the human condition will be the urban condition. But the 21st century will also be a “Southern” century, even an “Asian” century, with much of the urban growth taking place in the cities of the global South, especially in the emergent economic powerhouses of India and China. Such transformations are accompanied by ambitious claims of tectonic shifts in global power, of the making of “Asian” futures, and of the building of Asian “world-class” cities. This talk outlines the making of cities of the Asian century – as both a place-in-the-world and as global future. But it also outlines the contradictions and contestations that haunt the Asian city, how the global future is constantly reimagined and reclaimed as a mass dream.

Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds the Friesen Chair in Urban Studies. Roy is also co-director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center and education director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty and Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Roy’s most recent book is a co-edited volume, with Aihwa Ong, titled Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.