Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities

Anne Rademacher, K. Sivaramakrishnan

• Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9789888754533
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Social Sciences

Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities explores the encounter between two processes that are unfolding in diverse patterns across Asia—the rapid urbanization of Asia across big cities, smaller towns, and the newest urban concentrations; and the contentious debates and novel schemes by which nature is figured and emplaced in cities and their conurbations. Contemporary Asian cities displace nature by causing its death and withering, but also embrace it through acts of renewal and the pursuit of sustainability. Contributors to this volume gather case studies from across Asia to address projects of urban greening and reimagining nature in urban life. The book illustrates how the intersection of urban growth and urban nature is a place rich with fresh ideas about urban planning, governance, and social life. This book illuminates a continuing process of discovery and regeneration through which urban natures may well be moving from taken-for-granted infrastructures to more consciously experienced sites of interplay between non-human life and materials, and daily human life experiences. Debates and efforts to recover nature in the city provoke moral and ethical evaluations of the human ecology of city life, and direct ecologies of urbanism into new avenues like aesthetics, care, perception, and stewardship.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Synposis
• Author Biography
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Divine Excess
• 2. Putting the Garden Back
• 3. The Village at the End of the World
• 4. The Singapore “Garden City”
• 5. The Absent Presence
• 6. The Death and Life of Urban Ecological Commons in Taipei
• 7. Making Land Out of Water
• 8. Concrete Ecology
• 9. Keeping Pace with the Foodshed in Hangzhou
• List of Contributors
• Index