What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers' comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book's point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.
Edited by:
Gregory Bracken
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 550g
ISBN: 9781041175568
ISBN 10: 1041175566
Series: Asian Cities
Pages: 298
Publication Date: 01 December 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Illustrations. List of Tables. Acknowledgements. Introduction, Gregory Bracken. 1. Citizenship and the Good Life, Gregory Bracken. 2. Spaces of the Prudent Self, Li Shiqiao. 3. Socrates, 'Alcibiades 1', and Foucault's Last Turn, Patrick Healy. 4. The Biopolitics of Sexuality and the Hypothesis of an Erotic Art: Foucault and Psychoanalysis, Luiz Paulo Leitão Martins. 5. Elective Spaces: Creating Space to Care, Karan August. 6. Interpreting Dao (?) between 'Way-making' and 'Be-wëgen', Massimiliano Lacertosa. 7. Constructing Each Other: Contemporary Travel of Urban-Design Ideas between China and the West, Katharina M. Borgmann and Deirdre Sneep 8. A Tale of Two Courts: The Interactions of the Dutch and Chinese Political Elites with their Cities, Ian R. Lewis. 9. Urban Acupuncture: Care and Ideology in the Writing of the City in Eleventh-Century China, Christian de Pee. 10. The Value and Meaning of Temporality and its Relationship to Identity in Kunming City, China, Yun Gao and Nicolas Temple. 11. Junzi (??), the Confucian Concept of the 'Gentleman' and its Influence on South Korean Land-Use Planning, Klaas Kresse. 12. Home Within Movement: The Japanese Concept of Ma (?): Sensing Space-time Intensity in Aesthetics of Movement, Renske Maria van Dam. 13. The Concept of 'Home': The Javanese Creative Interpretation of Omah Bhetari Sri: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity, Sri Teddy Rusdy, Brandon Cahyadhuha, and Hastangka. Afterword, Gregory Bracken. Biographies. Index.
Gregory Bracken is Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at TU Delft and one of the co-founders of Footprint, the journal dedicated to architecture theory. From 2009 to 2015 he was a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) Leiden where he co-founded the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA). His publications include The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Vanishing Urban Vernacular (2013), Asian Cities: Colonial to Global (2015), Contemporary Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West (2020), and Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West (2019).
