The Asian city in a new urban age

This chapter recapitulates the endeavour of providing a comprehensive, up-to-date, and inclusive examination of Asian cities in the contexts of sustainability, globalisation, and COVID-19. It posits a quantity–quality contradiction—materialised through the relationality between quantitative growth and qualitative transformation—that confronts urban Asia and underpins many representations of Asian urban landscapes and changes. It delves into the conception of ‘Asianness’ and establishes an intellectual thread of Asian urbanism through the past, present, and future to capture ‘Asianness’ in both the reality and imaginary of Asian cities. It revisits the extant scholarship on ‘Asianising’ the standpoints of and approaches to the Asian city, and extends the search for ‘Asianness’ in new contexts and along new directions into the second decade of the 21st century and beyond. In doing so, it refreshes the reading and imagining of the post-sustainable, post-global, and post-pandemic Asian city in a new urban age marked by increasing change, uncertainty, and disruption.