The period of rapid urbanization triggered in the 1980s and ‘90s by global financial deregulation, the breakdown of the Cold War, and the emergence of internet and mobile phone connectivity has already produced several waves of academic discourse on the Dynamic City. Throughout Asia, the relation between landscape, water and culture has always held a privileged position – which is now being seriously threatened as both a spatial reality and socio-cultural perception. Modernist enthusiasms--with echoes of constructivism and futurism--and dystopic fears--extending critiques of the over stimulation and loss of humanism of the modern metropolis--have both marked the polarity of Dynamic City discourse. Yet, new arrivals to the city continue to seek out its promise of personal freedom, mobility, and new subjectivities producing the greatest challenges in the latest wave of urbanization: the balance between growth and pressures on the environment. Together these conditions, perceptions, and anticipations form the land, water and cultural dynamics of the contemporary city.

 

This call for submissions to a special theme issue of Nakhara seeks ways to ground the multiple cacophonous conversations on the Dynamic City by bringing together diverse examples of environmental design practices that explore the ecological, economic, political, or social dynamics between land, water and culture in this new urban condition. Authors from any discipline related to these issues are encouraged to submit manuscripts that not only critically examine the recent history of urbanization and globalization, but also theorize and formulate ways forward in creating new forms of practice within an increasingly Dynamic City.