Southeast Asia Spotlight - May 1, 2026 - Built Environment and Urban Studies Panel

Built Environment and Urban Studies Panel at the 2nd Harvard Southeast Asia Studies Graduate Conference (2024): Navigating Shifting Urban Forms

Over the past two years, the Built Environment and Urban Studies panel at the Harvard Southeast Asia Studies Graduate Conference has brought together emerging scholarship on the consequences of modernization in the region, examining the negotiation between top-down decision making and bottom-up lived experience. The papers have demonstrated how the hierarchical impositions of design were implemented, negotiated, and adapted through case studies spanning the past fifty years from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

 

Front covers of Baan Mai magazine
Figure 1. Front covers of Baan Mai magazine, issues 1 (May 1976) and 6 (October 1976). The first issue presents public housing flats as sites of optimism and everyday aspiration: beneath the large concrete blocks, domestic life is imagined as flourishing, expressed through the joyful faces and bright eyes of the children pictured on the cover. Their cheerful smiles and air of carefree ease convey a sense of satisfaction intended to resonate with readers. Images courtesy of the National Housing Authority, Thailand.

Historian and graphic designer Napisa Leelasuphapong’s paper on Baan Mai (New Home), a magazine published by Thailand’s National Housing Authority between 1976 and 1979, examines public housing as both a material and cultural project. The magazine, distributed free of charge to residents of Housing Authority flats, offered advice on adapting to life in high-rise housing, such as managing small spaces, maintaining cleanliness, and reducing noise, and served as a communication tool between the government and residents. Leelasuphapong’s reading of Baan Mai shows that the magazine also became a space of negotiation, giving residents a platform to voice their complaints about adjustments to new forms of urban living and shaping the meaning of societal and cultural shifts in a new home culture. Public housing, in this account, was not only built by the state but continually remade through domestic life.

Napisa Leelasuphapong is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. More on Leelasuphapong’s research: Napisa Leelasuphapong, “Baan Mai Magazine as a Space of Negotiation: Constructing Home Culture in National Housing Authority Flats, 1976–1979,” NAJUA: History of Architecture and Thai Architecture 22, no. 2 (2025): 327–50. 

Screen capture showing a Vietnamese architect’s digital library of 3D and 2D “ready-made” ornaments
Figure 2. Screen capture showing a Vietnamese architect’s digital library of 3D and 2D “ready-made” ornaments, organized into categories such as brackets, columns, cornices, parapets, pillars, and pillar tops. In his research, Jacques conducted interviews with architects that shed light on how neoclassical ornamentation in New Development Areas emerges through reference to such visual examples. Image courtesy of Olivier Jacques.

 

Olivier Jacques brings us to contemporary New Urban Areas in Hanoi, where the state entrusts the private sector with building the new city. Hanoi’s speculative urban expansion promises to serve the city by offering a new mode of urbanization through urban order, modern infrastructure, and contemporary housing. Yet many of these new urban areas are detached from everyday needs, a condition Jacques describes as urban asynchrony: a cultural and aesthetic gap between pro-growth ambitions, fueled by popular desires for newness, and existing ways of inhabiting the city. Drawing on interviews and surveys in Hanoi’s new development areas, Jacques shows that their urban futures remain suspended through a combination of speculative logics, planning procedures, and everyday adaptations, shaped by the institutional and historical conditions of postcolonial and postsocialist Vietnam. At the same time, he shows how borrowed architectural languages are selectively reassembled in these contexts, contributing to this suspension while also opening alternative potentials, as informal uses begin to reanimate these spaces and diversify urban life.

Olivier Jacques holds a PhD in Architecture from McGill University. More on Jacques’ research: Olivier Jacques, “Suspended Urban Futures: Volatility and Idleness in the New Urban Areas of Hanoi, Vietnam,” Thresholds 53 (2025): 94–123. 

 

Read together, these papers discuss how Southeast Asian countries manage both international influences and local implementation. In particular, a close reading of built form, in dialogue with an urban studies framework of understanding patterns of everyday life, becomes useful for understanding how built forms are appropriated. In doing so, the panel offers a comparative lens that highlights both the shared struggle and the distinct strategies employed across Southeast Asia. It invited us to explore the myriad ways of negotiations and people’s struggles for better living conditions in Southeast Asia. One wonders: how might urban development approaches be designed to better align with actual needs from the get-go?

Initiated by Robin Albrecht (MArch ’26) with co-chairs Marcus Yee (Yale) in 2024 and Joshua Tan (MIT) in 2025, the Built Environment and Urban Studies Panel created a space for thinking across geographies, disciplines, and scales, bringing architecture, urban studies, planning, design history, and anthropology into conversation. The panels included responses from Professors Erik Harms and Andrew Stokols, with Professors Thongchai Winichakul and Anna Tsing as keynote speakers for the Conference.

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