City building knowledge from neighbourhoods in Asia Pacific

Abstract

Neighbourhoods are places of social encounters on a daily basis, but they are getting insufficient attention from policy makers and urban studies in conceptualising the city. While the city is often the unit of analysis and boundaries of data collection, social constructions of the city are mostly from neighbourhoods. By shifting the analysis to the neighbourhood scale, we are moving scholarship and research on two fronts. First, we need to think about city building knowledge at a pedagogical and methodological level. Second, we want to examine processes and amenity creation at the neighbourhood scale and make visible the ways these add to city politics, economy, and culture. Articles in this special issue contribute to urban scholarship in the following ways: (i) neighbourhood as a method of urban studies; (ii) understanding urban politics and government; (iii) the role of urban informality and small businesses; and (iv) the role of traditional neighbourhood institutions in the social life of the city. Neighbourhoods can be poorly resourced and inward-looking, but in many cases localised interests, relationships and organisations are capable of collective action, networking beyond their localities, and inspiring its residents with aspirations of the city's future directions.