As one of the central myths of modernity, the narrative of progress continues to be a powerful force underlying various urbanizing projects in the Asia-Pacific. How is "progress" represented and practiced in everyday life and what are its pastoral, violent and critical forms?  How has the process of urbanization in its multiple logics and scales become entangled in and unraveled by the contradictions of progress? From mega-projects to slums, gated communities to public housing, this panel examines the segregated but intersecting geographies of progress, where every construction of prosperity, community and security produces spaces of poverty, violence and alienation. Such dialectical processes redraw the frontiers of capitalist expansion in the Asia Pacific region, such that they are not inherent in particular sites or development models or political ideologies, but instantiated in the flow of ideas, institutions, models, people and commodities. By framing the open-ended, relational and reflexive modalities of urban governance and livelihoods as "experiments", this panel seeks to address relevance and limitations of critical urban theory today. 

Kah-Wee Lee 
National University of Singapore 
Dept. of Architecture 

Email: leekahwee at nus.edu.sg