Introduction: Perceiving and conceiving the Asian city†

Abstract

Asian cities are the setting of a vast agglomeration of transportation devices and services. These means of transport are inseparable from distinct concepts and images of the city. Interventions into modes of urban transport are inspired by visions for the future of urban life and quotidian practices of traversing urban space foster particular experiences that produce distinct ideas about the city. This special issue takes the multiplicity of mobility practices in Asian cities as a point of departure to interrogate connections between embodied experiences and collective representations. Drawing on three bodies of literature that deal with the topics of urban imaginaries, infrastructures as well as the body and the city, this introduction provides a theoretical framework for the study of connections between perception and conception of cities that informs the contributions to this special issue. It sets the stage for a set of three interconnected questions that guide the contributions: How do people affectively engage with urban spaces through practices of bodily movement? How are these practices of movement related to and generative of specific ideas and representations of the city? How do these practices of movement transform, challenge, subvert, or conform to dominant ideas and representations of the city?