4th International Conference
Rising Asia, Anxious Europe
2-3 May 2012
Asian Dynamics Initiative-University of Copenhagen

Urban Imaginaries and Power in Asia's world-level Cities

The rise of Asian cities and their challenges: New configurations of East West power relations within the urban arena?

The world is witnessing a global shift in power relations between the ‘old West' and the East which puts Asia's developed and rapidly developing economies at the global centre stage. While these trends are mostly seen in a globalization and a national perspective, it is also clear that they cannot be understood, if the dynamics at the sub-national and urban level are left out of the account.

Asia's large cities are ‘world-cities', that is, urban agglomerates with millions of inhabitants struggling to accommodate to and exploit new challenges and opportunities posed by global risks, opportunities and shifts (Beck & Grande 2010). They are important dynamos in the shifts that we witness from the ‘old West' to the East.

We invite abstracts that focus on aspects related to Asian questions that arise from the speed and scale of new forms of urbanism in Asia. Asia's cities also engage with European partners in different types of ventures and we would like to solicit papers that either deal with developments in Asian cities themselves or that deal with the Asia-Europe connection or its contestations.

Read more about the conference here

Aihwa Ong, Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley will give a keynote speech on "Science as the Heart of “World-Class” Cities in Asia".