Asian Cities and Urban Settlers is an interdisciplinary network of scholars living and working in cities around Asia. Through a series of workshops and collaborative field work, the group aims to build a body of local history in marginal and informal urban settlements throughout the region, based on extended interviews and life histories of occupants. One of the working principles of the project is to find new ways to connect grassroots knowledge to academic and policy perspectives on urbanization and informality. Despite the attention focused on informal settlement in recent years, the voices of the settlers themselves have had a relatively small place in the urban literature. The local historical portraits of urbanization that Asian Cities and Urban Settlers produces will provide material for cross-regional and global comparisons of patterns of settlement formation, rural-urban trajectories, the relationship of present and past settlements, and the shaping of urban ecosystems by the work of settlers to make their environments habitable. In a later stage, network members will also assist occupants in recording and documenting their own lives and surroundings. Local history will thus serve two functions: first, to inform—and perhaps help reframe—macro-scale academic and policy analysis; and second, to foster a stronger sense of community and civic identity among occupants.
