Neo-royal urbanisms: Royal agency in contemporary city building in Southeast Asia

Monarchies in Southeast Asia are neither residual nor archaic institutions. This editorial introduction to the special issue argues that royal entities in the region – across Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand – remain adaptive and active forces that shape contemporary urbanisation in significant ways. Drawing on a critical comparative framework, it introduces the concept of neo-royal urbanisms to describe how royal institutions routinely use urban development to realise and express power, while non-royal interests in turn leverage royal endorsement to secure development objectives. The article situates Southeast Asian monarchies within a broader global resurgence of personalistic, quasi-royal political authority, arguing that the region offers a distinctive and theoretically generative vantage point from which to examine these trends. The article also addresses the methodological challenges of researching élite royal power, including restricted access, explicit and implicit censorship and the opacity of networks that blur royal, commercial and military interests. It argues that the built environment itself constitutes a critical field of evidence for tracing royal agency. Together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate that the city is not merely a backdrop to neo-royalism but the primary medium through which symbolic, political and economic royal power is assembled and contested.