ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how aspiration runs – for the most part implicitly – through scholarship on a variety of aspects of urbanization in the region. It reviews four key themes in existing scholarship on urbanization in Southeast Asia, each of which invokes issues of aspiration. The four key themes are: rural to urban migration and mobilities; migrants' remaking of themselves and city space; the middle-class city; and increasingly global constitutive geographies of city transformation in the region. The intersection of human mobility and shifting patterns of development troubles both the rural-urban divide and any straightforward separation of the economic and cultural aspects of aspiration. Both the capacity to remake the city and oneself through the city is highly unevenly distributed. In addition, over time, the city – can become an object of aspirational transformation. Though nostalgia is grounded in collective memories of the communal past, it also expresses middle-class aspirations for alternative ways of life amidst rapid urbanization.
