SEAC hosted this roundtable discussion, focused on community practice and heritage. This event was held in collaboration with The Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL and the Urban Salon.
Heritage making has often focused on the built form, at the expense of leaving out intangible heritage and everyday life of communities. Living heritage is a concept that enables to rethinking of urban futures based on multiple temporal trajectories and alternative epistemologies of what gets valued in the city and whose spatial practices are legitimized. In exploring living heritage in Southeast Asian cities we bring together diverse researchers reframing the understanding of it as a process grounded in the everyday practices of communities and as a strategy to gain political leverage to combatting spatial and epistemic violence.
A video recording of this event is available here.
Speakers and Chair Biographies
Marina Kolovou Kouri is an urban designer and researcher working on community-led development with a focus on Myanmar. She has been collaborating with grassroots organizations in Yangon, coordinating and/or participating in projects around urban safety, housing, informality, and displacement. She is part of the research team in the ongoing project "Yangon Stories: Framing Living Heritage as Tool to Prevent Spatial Violence," led by the Development Planning Unit.
Dr. Elizabeth Rhoads is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Human Rights in Southeast Asia, splitting time between the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies and the Centre for Human Rights Studies at Lund University.
Dr. Jayde Roberts is a senior lecturer in the School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney and an interdisciplinary scholar of Urban Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research in Myanmar focuses on urban informality, heritage-making, and the effects of transnational networks. During her 2016-2018 Fulbright US Scholar term, she worked with Myanmar’s universities and municipal departments to investigate discourses of urban development in Yangon. Her book, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese, was published by University of Washington Press in 2016.
Sri Suryani is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield investigating the displacement process of riverbank settlements by flood-risk mitigation policy in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her research aims to understand the social process in displacements, differentiated water infrastructures, and the temporality of spatial politics.
Dr. Supitcha Tovivich is a full-time Lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, Silpakorn University. She was the Head of Department of Architecture (2015-2018). She received her Ph.D. from the Bartlett DPU, University College London, and her MA in Humanitarian and Development Practice, Oxford Brookes University. Her expertise is in participatory design, participatory community development, co-create city rehabilitation, community engagement, and urban design intervention. Her practice focuses on the integration of architectural education, community-based design studio, and tactical urbanism. She has been working with a number of local communities in Bangkok such as the Khlong Bang Luang community, which is an old canal-sided settlement, the 24-hours Bangkok Flower Market, and other communities in Bangkok Old City Area.
Dr. Catalina Ortiz (@cataortiza) is a Colombian urbanist. She uses critical pedagogies and decolonial methodologies to study the politics of space production in cities of the global south in order to find alternative ways to forge spatial-racial-epistemic justice. She currently works as Associate Professor and co-Programme Leader of the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at University College London.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune)is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.
The Bartlett Development Planning Unit conducts world-leading research and postgraduate teaching that helps to build the capacity of national governments, local authorities, NGOs, aid agencies and businesses working towards socially just and sustainable development in the global south.
The Urban Salon is a London based seminar series aimed at scholars, artists, practitioners and others who are exploring urban experiences within an international and comparative frame.