floating. No gears shifting.

Extract

It is impressive how, in Prasenjit Duara's essay, Asian regions are understood and presented—in the breadth of the world, not as objects with sharp edges, or compact entities of cultures, economies, and politics, not as blocks of which the present and the global so often are still thought to be made. Reading Duara's essay, I was made to think of the celebrated Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's current grand plan for Singapore, the epitome of Asia today, a design conceived not as a space made of buildings, offices, and flats, not of blocks, but of flows—bridges and flyovers, “links,” as Maki calls them. These links are there as the most powerful part of the whole, making the city-state space by cutting through it, over the blocks, and along them. The links are empowered to make everything in the city-state to face the open, and to move into the open. A skeptic, of course, may ask, “into what open?” Indeed, the “links” of Singapore, at least those already in action, often lead from offices, flats, and blocks into one mega-supermarket and then into another.