The contributions in this special issue are based on an interdisciplinary
research project concerned with the formation of
public spaces and urban imaginaries in Asia's global cities. The
project has been based at Heidelberg University's Cluster of
Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” (2009e12). This
edited volume continues and deepens discussions the project
members engaged in during an international workshop in Delhi in
October 2010. Entitled “Spaces in-between: from non-place to shared
space in developmental cities” and hosted by the Goethe-Institut in
Delhi, the workshop set out to explore how new urban spaces in
China (Shanghai) and India (Delhi) are not only consumed, contested
and altered but are also performed and sensed as “in-between”
places of transcultural entanglements. The workshop
coincided with Shanghai's EXPO still being in full swing while the
Commonwealth Games (CWG) had only just ended in Delhi. Both
mega-events had mobilised radical visual transformations of public
space and urban imaginaries. Although the urban spectacle was
highlighting fleeting spaces of vanity, flattered by the grand and
highly aestheticized gestures of competitive attention, access or
dissent (Butcher & Velayutham, 2009), as well as by demolition and construction, we were interested in how it might also be a catalyst
for alternative publics and public spheres to develop, or at least, to
be imagined. Moreover, the concept of “in-between” spaces can not
just be reduced to temporary space-use (“Zwischenraumnutzung”)
in a “literal, geophysical” sense. As a concept, it encourages a view
on fluid, even precarious interstices and boundaries nestled amidst
concrete spatial arrangements and forms often taken for granted,
attributed with particular e and sometimes one-dimensional e
meaning. The “in-between” alerts us to a more differentiating,
often self-reflexively questioning approach towards the intangible
experiences and practices that exist but are often overseen. It is,
thus, the look against the grain, the gaze between the clearly
readable, the concept as heuristic tool, that is of utmost relevance
for this Special Issue on urban semiotics and imaginaries.
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