ABSTRACT

Aspiration is not prominent among the concepts that are conventionally used to account for urban change in Southeast Asia or elsewhere. Nonetheless, in this chapter we show how aspiration runs – for the most part implicitly – through scholarship on a variety of aspects of urbanization in the region. Drawing upon the work of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2004), aspiration for us is not limited to individual wants, desires and choices but demands consideration of wider values and ways of seeing. Appadurai considers systems of ideas about the good life, health and happiness as “cultural”, while others might prefer to view them in terms of “discourses”. Either way, part of the appeal of aspiration is as a mid- or meso-level concept that is about more than individual agency while also taking seriously human imagination and action in ways that tend to escape the purview of more structuralist analyses.