BOOKS

Highlighting how Asian cities have become databases for external theories, and asking how much we do not know about Asian cities, Transforming Asian Cities calls for the study of Asian cities on their own terms. Building on, and addressing a huge gap left in the work of Lefebvre and Harvey, People's Spaces attempts to define lived spaces, how people negotiate/create spaces. His first book Society and Space/ Decolonizing Ceylon maps the politics of space in Sri Lanka, i.e., the colonial production of Ceylon and its spaces and how the Sri Lankans responded to these. Highlighting how the Sri Lankan (and many states across the world) have squandered “development opportunities,” the special issue of Bhumi discusses Development

PEOPLE’S SPACES: COPING, FAMILIARIZING, CREATING

New York, London: Routledge, 2016

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“That the making of urban space and life is largely located in the systematic, impetuous, and equivocal efforts of the majority of a city’s inhabitants, and which persist in spite of the impositions and destructions of both well-known and unfamiliar forces, remains an interminable reality and conundrum. For the ordinary contributions of this majority are undervalued to the extent of being rendered invisible or irrelevant. But by offering a sweeping historical account across varied Asian contexts and circumstances ... Perera restores the breadth of the creation, adjustments and intersections at work in how such contributions confront all kinds of disasters, dispossessions and potentials as a vital common sense.
There is no book I know that so clearly renders apparently shrinking horizons into testaments of uneasy endurance.””
— AbdouMaliq Simone, Research Professor, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
 

Special Issue of Bhumi on Development

Volume 5 - Issue 1 - 2016

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For a look-back of the volumes by the author, after two decades, see the interview:

Nihal Perera on Social Production of Space