SYMPOSIUM Recentering Southeast Asian Cities DANIEL P.S. GOH and TIM BUNNELL Abstract For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for the reorganization of the developmental state and the growing importance of private capital and urban social movements in driving urban processes and politics. This symposium offers the fresh lens of ‘recentering’ to discuss the urbanisms emerging from decentralization and the triangulating state–capital–social movement politics of the new urbanisms. Drawing on recent discussions of Manuel Castells’ (1983) The City and the Grassroots, we seek to expand the conception of urban activism not just by considering non-Western cases in the newly democratizing states of Southeast Asia, but also by considering cities as co-agents of activism. We see the recentering of Southeast Asian cities as referring to political actions that take the city not only as site and repository, but also reflexively as identity in itself to be fought with, for and over. For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. Globalizing capital has been transforming Western and non-Western societies alike, pushing bulging cities to the forefront of political geographies that formerly revolved around nation-states. Urban theory has been focused on making sense of the new. Given the cultural and political heterogeneity of a region that has historically been the contact zone of Asian and Western civilizations, Southeast Asian cities provide an empirical touchstone for ongoing debates in urban studies. One debate has seen the argument for the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes (Dick and Rimmer, 1998), and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms (Ho, 2005; Leaf, 2007). In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralizing governance on the cities of the global South (Shatkin, 2007; Beard et al., 2008) and East and Southeast Asia (Bae and Sellers, 2007; Douglass et al., 2007; Wu, 2007), with consequences for the reorganization of the developmental state and the growing importance of private capital and urban social movements in driving urban processes and politics. Scholarship on Southeast Asian urbanism has been The articles collected here were presented at the ‘Global Urban Frontiers: Asian Cities in Theory, Practice and Imagination’ workshop, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 8–9 September 2010. We are grateful to the IJURR reviewers of the symposium for their critical, constructive comments. Volume 37.3 May 2013 825–33 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2013.01208.x © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by John Wiley & Sons. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA