Metropolitics

Urban Theory and the Cold War: Reflections on the Political Economy of Urban Land and Real-Estate Development in Southeast Asia

Gavin Shatkin — 2025-11-07T06:05:00Z

The Cold War's repressive politics of land and law still underpin the region's contemporary struggles over land rights, urban space and democracy.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” When the non-governmental organization Jakarta Legal Aid sought a legal avenue to confront the Indonesian state over its use of summary eviction as a tool of urban planning, it focused on a Cold War‑era law, Law 51/1960. Commonly used to justify evictions of settlements for urban infrastructure

- Essays / real estate, real-estate turn, Asia, Southeast Asia, authoritarian regime, Cold War, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, The Philippines

Provincializing the “Real‑Estate Turn”

Sai Balakrishnan & Llerena Guiu Searle — 2025-11-07T06:00:00Z

The papers in this collection “think against” the concept of real estate, starting with—and generating—grounded questions about particular places.
---- ▼ Jump to the list of articles in this series ▼ Standing in front of Trump Tower's gold and bronze facade in Lower Parel Mumbai (formerly Bombay), real estate may seem an inevitably global phenomenon. This sleek, American-style building—part of a gated complex with pools, gyms, gardens, and other upscale amenities—has come up in a district

- Series / South Africa, real estate, real-estate turn, Focus, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, India, United States, Mumbai, Chennai, Pretoria, Johannesburg

Floods, Animals and Shared Urban Futures?

Leonie Tuitjer — 2018-04-10T05:00:00Z

When the city of Bangkok flooded following tropical storms in 2011, an altered urban waterscape erased the neat divide between human and nonhuman spaces. Leonie Tuitjer draws attention to two recurrent themes of interspecies interaction in the flood's aftermath: sacrifices and compromises people made to protect companion animals, and anxieties generated by wild animals that had taken refuge in or near human settlements.
---- Series: Climate Change and Social Change Southeast Asia is one of

- From the Field / water, climate change, flooding, interspecies interaction, human–animal relations, Thailand, Southeast Asia, Bangkok