The 2014 Great Asian Streets Symposium (GASS), themed ‘Asian Urban Places’, was the sixth in a lineage of conferences convened at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore. Typically held at two-year intervals, the GASS was established for the purpose of developing Asian perspectives in literature and discussions, as well as to foster regional and international dialogue. The sixth GASS was organized around the themes of urban nature; street form and morphology; street networks; community spaces; heritage conservation and urban regeneration; and planning, policies, and politics.

The symposium aimed to ‘investigate underlying urban transformation processes, discuss contemporary professional experiences and best practices, and explore future visions, design ideas, and planning strategies for Asian cities in a new era’(GASS 2014). Five keynote speeches were used to bring forward a variety of perspectives on the key themes and were distributed across two days in the midst of a number of parallel sessions. Jürgen Rosemann, of National University of Singapore, delivered the opening keynote. Rosemann employed two of Rem Koolhaas’s seminal