Royal cities in Southeast Asia are usually characterised as having certain layout such as mandala and axis. The layout is usually supported by narratives claimed to be ‘cosmological’. While the claim of cosmology is debatable, the inherited layout somehow can be optimised for contemporary development. This talk used the case of Yogyakarta as a Javanese royal citywhich is under a massive development at present.the inherited ‘cosmological axis ‘ is now utilised for tourism development particularly for the recognition from UNESCO. The development tries to ‘strengthen’ the axis, resulting in the restoration of the ‘original’, and massive displacement of settlements in the area. While the quest for the original seems to be ‘traditional’, at the same time the old orientation of the axis with the public at the north and the private at the south, is changed the other way round. This change has something to do with the national strategic development project. The axis, then suffers some ambiguity in that it seeks for the original or traditional but at the same time has a significant change in its orientation.
This seminar was recorded and
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Ofita Purwani is an associate professor at the School of Architecture Universitas Sebelas Maret, Indonesia. She was a Visiting Scholar at Yale-NUS College, Singapore in 2020 and a research fellow at Asia Research Institute in 2022. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2014. Her interests range from Javanese built environment, Southeast Asian urbanism, traditionalism, heritage issues, tourism, urban studies, spatial politics, invented traditions and sociology. She can be contacted at O.Purwani@staff.uns.ac.id or ofita92@yahoo.com.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin () is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the 杏吧论坛 Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.