A 2017 New York Times article on the late Clive Davies quoted Melissa Manchester on Davies: “He always wanted me to be current and I always wanted to be timeless.”

These two time frames are a good way of describing my intentions for writing this book. The title “The Neighbourhood for the City” is timeless in urban studies research. Simmel, Weber, and the Chicago School have all dealt with the problem of social relations in the city. And the literature is enormous.

And yet the book is current because many of the old issues refuse to die, like the question of localised collective action and the issues and impacts this raise. I have taken a more materialist concept of community by focusing on neighbourhood projects and how these pull residents together and how these projects create amenities that critically add to the liveability of cities. New forms of urban development emerge in the political and economic changes faced by Pacific Asia's largest cities. And new forms of urban governance are created by local state and neighbourhood partnerships.

The book makes three contributions to urban studies. First, this book is one of the few in Asian urban studies adopting a multi-sited comparative approach in studying local action in five important cities (Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei) in Pacific Asia. This approach enables comparisons across a number of key issues confronting the city: heritage (Bangkok and Taipei); community-involved provisioning of amenities (Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore); and placemaking versus place marketing (Hong Kong and Taipei). Second, my focus is on local community efforts at the neighbourhood level as an increasingly important third way. This is a sustainable and equitable alternative to state and market avenues of provision in a contemporary urban environment that sees declining state funds for services and amenities and where market provision creates unequal outcomes. And third, most studies ignore city governments, or view them as antagonistic (rights to the city and social movements literatures), or consider them in terms of efforts at planning and economic development (global cities and urban economic competitiveness literatures). My focus is on the collaborative efforts city governments establish with local communities and how this ultimately speaks to the liveability and progressivity of cities.