ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the critiques of city-centric urbanization. It outlines emerging ways of sensing that support research on hybrid urban-rural conditions. The chapter argues that thinking about urbanization in Southeast Asia necessarily sensitizes scholarship to hybrid urban-rural settlement patterns and processes. The primary critique of city-centric urbanization is motivated less by the dilemmas of quantification of the growing city, and the extensive territorial effects they produce. Scholars working in rural development acknowledge the production efficiencies and profit gains of capital intensive industrial reforms and that they are necessary to stem the growing income gap between urban and rural regions. The chapter examines urbanization in Southeast Asia sensitizes scholarship and worlding practices to the possibilities of urban-rural hybrids or so-called desakota conditions. It concludes with a range of methodological experiments being developed by the urban-rural systems research team at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore that aim to refine Micro-mechanization approach.
