Introduction: the production and contestation of exemplary centres in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian cities have long been produced as the ‘exemplary centres’ of the region, shaped in various and overlapping ways by the imperial gaze, nationalist visions (and their democratised versions), and by the familiar blueprints of international capital. Through such exemplary visions, the region’s cities have been designed to cultivate collective memories and subjectivities, as well as to project power and authority. In addition, and often as an integral result of the realisation of grand visions, regional metropolises are also dynamic sites of rapid urbanisation, of contested processes of expropriation and eviction, and places of dissent and resistant subject formation. Further, impoverished urban populations increasingly suffer environmental discrimination and bear the worst of the effects of contamination and climate change, while at the same time, discourses of hygiene, criminality, and uninhabitability are employed to denigrate the urban poor and their environments. This special issue adopts the concept of the ‘exemplary centre’ —the coordinates and complexities of which are mapped by Abidin Kusno in the Foreword to this collection— in order to explore the often-contradictory realities of urban scale contemporary change.