Postcolonial-Urban-Maritime Architecture in Asia

This book proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding architecture and urbanism in Asia through the intertwined metaphors of the postcolonial, the urban, and the maritime.It positions Asia not as a cultural identity or fixed geography, but as a methodological horizon shaped by articulation, negotiation, and discontinuous historicity. Against universalising narratives that treat Asian architecture as derivative or exceptional, the book foregrounds entanglement and circulation as constitutive conditions of spatial knowledge. Concepts such as display, colony character, appropriate fuzziness, and micro-historicity are mobilised to capture the fractured and provisional character of architectural knowledge in Asia. These are developed through empirical sites across East and Southeast Asia, where infrastructural improvisations and heteroglossic assemblages reveal architecture as a field continually reconfigured through contestation. Rather than presenting a unified theory, the book offers a repertoire of concepts attentive to flux, opacity, and unfinishedness. In doing so, it advances a situated and dynamic theorisation of architecture in Asia, where amphibious ‘tidal grounds’ articulate the restless interplay of thought, practice, and environment.Providing a unique analytical framework attentive to the fluidities of region, history, and spatial knowledge, this book is a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners in architecture and urban design, postcolonial studies, cultural geography, Asian studies and maritime urban history.

Francis Chia Hui Lin is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. His research explores the intersections of architectural theory, postcolonial thought, and urbanism in Asia, with a particular focus on epistemic entanglement, maritime grounds, and the politics of spatial knowledge. He is the author of Heteroglossic Asia (2015), Architectural Theorisations and Phenomena in Asia (2017), and The Postcolonial Condition of Architecture in Asia (2022). His work has been recognised with the Ta-You Wu Memorial Award (2019), one of Taiwan’s highest honours for early-career scholars. He is also founding director of Studio: Asia, Postcoloniality and Spatiality (APS), an academic platform dedicated to interrogating spatial practices through critical postcolonial perspectives..