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Preface and Acknowledgments This project owes its origins to a small workshop, called “Citizenship, Civility, and Environmental Sustainability across Urban Asia,” convened at Yale in January 2009 in the Department of Anthropology. Many of the contributors in this volume, and a few others, met to discuss the relationship between the making of urban society and the urban environment. How, we asked, do these intersect? We were particularly interested in Asia, where dramatic urban growth made this inquiry especially timely. As our group was comprised entirely of scholars working in India, we decided to focus on the Indian experience in its historical complexity and geographical diversity. Even within India, we limited ourselves in initial deliberations to two of its most important cities—Delhi and Mumbai—with their strikingly different modern histories of urbanization. The discussions were lively and fruitful; they persuaded us to move forward as a research network that would meet periodically to continue to share ideas and writing. From work in these Indian cities, and other metropolitan centers as well, we found our discussions increasingly organized around four themes. The first we identified as ‘the political ecology of the city.’ We considered how, in the spirit of that scholarly tradition, natural resource claims in urban contexts may resonate in particular ways with questions of citizenship, civility, informality, and equity. A second theme addressed the political mobilization of urban middle classes around environmental concerns such as urban health, aesthetics, recreation, and conservation. Here we asked, how do middle-class sensibilities constitute ideologies of belonging to the city, and construct ‘natural’ spaces in the city? We then identified a third set of issues related to green corporatism and green design, which addressed ideas of nature and aspirations for the ecological remaking of cities. Questions of sustainability in urban infrastructure, architecture, and planning were xiv Preface and Acknowledgments central. Finally, in a cluster of questions related to civil society and ideas of nature in the city, we explored issues associated with nature in the city— safety, access to recreation and leisure space, public health—and other understandings of nature that differentiate the city from the countryside. With these themes defined, we agreed to meet a year later for a full conference at the University of Hong Kong. Research papers, grouped according to these thematic clusters, were presented to the group for intensive discussion. It was here that we were able to begin a series of discussions with scholars whose expertise lay outside the urban experience in India. This broadened and enriched our understanding of what we were coming to regard as the ecologies of urbanism in Indian cities. By the end of the Hong Kong conference, we were committed to both a publication that would assemble many of the papers that were discussed, and also future meetings, where we hoped for even more systematic comparative exchange drawing on urban ecology from other parts of Asia. The Hong Kong conference also helped us realize that our interest in contemporary urbanization and its ecological dimensions could benefit from engagement with urban history in India. To this end, we convened a panel at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies later that year. This panel explored how the histories of Indian urbanism illuminate the themes we pursued in Hong Kong. The current volume has come thereby to embrace a strong historical perspective, with several papers by historians and others who have taken a historical view of planning and urban infrastructure. This volume draws together many of the papers presented in Hong Kong, and two historical pieces presented at the Association for Asian Studies meeting. All the papers were further revised in light of comments we shared with each other, and submitted to an extended virtual discussion before this manuscript took its final shape. At this point, we are happy that the volume now contains papers not only about Delhi and Mumbai, where we started, but also about Bengaluru and Chennai. We realize that the next frontier for our collective enterprise is the ecologies of urbanism in smaller Indian cities and towns, as well as a more systematic placement of that experience in a wider Asian experience, from China to South East Asia, and other parts of South Asia. From its very inception three years ago in the small workshop in New Haven, this project has been blessed with the generous financial support of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Even more [3.17.150.89] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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