Rivers Before Roads: How Southeast Asia's Waterways Produced an Alternative Urbanism

Rivers Before Roads: How Southeast Asia's Waterways Produced an Alternative Urbanism

For most of the twentieth century, architecture has learned to read cities through roads. Street hierarchies define urban plans, intersections organize movement, and buildings are understood by the façades they present to sidewalks. Roads appear so fundamental to urban life that they are often mistaken for a universal condition. Across much of Southeast Asia, cities developed according to an entirely different spatial logic. Long before automobi…