Sponsored by the Urban Studies Foundation’s Seminar Series Award, this event was the first in a series of academic events on “Overlooked Cities: Thinking and doing global urban studies differently.” The conference facilitated a collective critique of the indifferent views on Asian cities that are marginalised, off-the-map, and under-theorised due to the logics of domination and control. It sharpened and expanded post- and de-colonial interventions that shift the focus of global urban studies to the urban majority, articulating under-studied and under-represented spaces, knowledge, and practices in the Asian context.
The key concern of this conference was to promote a fundamentally collective praxis of counter-overlooking, which requires broadening the scope and extending the subjects in seeing, knowing, and acting from/with overlooked cities. Over 3 days, this conference hosted 6 panel sessions, an ECR workshop and mentoring meeting, artistic installations and film screenings, and more. More than 70 researchers and practitioners (including 16 ECRs) working across Asia collaborated to shape a counter-overlooking agenda, to provide renewed critical impetus to think about, write about, care about and act on urban lives.
