Sustainable Tropical Urbanism: Insights from Cities of the Monsoonal Asia-Pacific

Abstract

The Tropics is experiencing the fastest growing urbanisation on the planet and faces serious sustainability issues. This introduction to the eTropic Special Issue on ‘Sustainable Tropical Urbanism’ calls for a notion of plural sustainabilities in order to critique how urban sustainability has mainly been developed in temperate zones and transferred to tropical regions; but also, to recognise shared aspects of the Tropics, including climate change and environmental challenges, as well as histories of colonialism and their continuing postcolonial cultural and socioeconomic effects on peoples of the Tropics and their futures. These threads are drawn together under a conceptual trio of Place, Past, and People in order to further explore these similarities and differences. Narrowing the focus to the monsoonal Asia-Pacific region, this Special Issue presents case studies from Khulna and Chittagong in Bangladesh; Singapore and the Indonesian city of Semarang in Southeast Asia; and the regional city of Cairns in tropical northeast Australia. This Special Issue of eTropic brings together research articles, scoping reviews and viewpoints from multiple disciplines and interdisciplines to explore the dynamics of sustainable tropical urbanism.