Subcultures as urban chi: The worlding Asian cities

Subculture is the new chic in town. From to Shanghai to Chennai, a new virtue of subculture chic is in the making, gaining popularity across and among city mayors, corporates, entrepreneurs and mass consumers. This evolving trend is bringing previously unknown and unseen practitioners of subculture – popularly regarded as dissenters and wanderers (Gelder & Thornton, 1997) – into whirlpools of urban activities and development plans. This evolving trend is also foregrounding two entangled attempts of worlding practices: subcultures’ attempts at carving habitable spaces in cities, and in return cities’ attempts at experimenting with subcultures to establish a new niche for themselves in the urban world order (Roy & Ong, 2011; Wilson & Connery, 2007). Under these circumstances, three scholarly questions merit further interrogation. First, what are subcultures, in reference to mainstream culture? Second, what do the processes of territorialization of subculture entail? And third, how to understand the variegated worlding practices exercised by both subcultures and their hosting cities in a dynamic process?