If twenty-first-century urbanization is understood as a problem, its regional epicenter is the cities in Asia. Facing unprecedented diversity in scale, scope, and environmental dynamics in the Asian urban experience, scholars will need an approach that can truly capture the significance of place and context. The challenge, as this volume illustrates, can be met by the analytic of ecologies of urbanism. Eschewing a rigid, single ecology, the contributors identify multiple forms of nature--in biophysical, cultural, and political terms--that have discernable impact on power relations and human social action. The case studies in this book—including leopards in Mumbai, a network of tubewells in northern India, an island that grows through reclamation in Hong Kong, and a railway continuum linking Khon Kaen and Bangkok—all attest to the versatility of ecologies of urbanism. Guided by urban processes rather than geopolitical boundaries, Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism offers a picture of urban Asia that is composed of varied ecologies of urbanism.

Introduction : places of nature in Asian cities and towns / Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan -- 1. Inquisitive legacies : ecologies of power and Goan modernity / R. Benedito Ferr{tilde}ao -- 2. Eco-socialism and green city making in postwar Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel -- 3. Urban leopards are good cartographers : human-nonhuman and spatial conflicts at Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai / Fr{acute}ed{acute}eric Landy -- 4. Hong Kong's artificial anti-archipelago and the unnaturing of the natural / Andrew Toland -- 5. Tales from the concrete cave : Delhi's Birla Temple and the genealogies of urban nature in India / Kajri Jain -- 6. Courts, public cultures of legality, and urban ecological imagination in Delhi / K. Sivaramakrishnan -- 7. Ecologies of possibility : dwelling, politics, and government along Khon Kaen's railway tracks / Eli Elinoff -- 8. Discrepant ecologies in a north Indian qasba : protected trees, degraded river / Ann Grodzins Gold -- 9. Re-imagining the Indian underground : a biography of the tubewell / Anthony Acciavatti.