Stephen Cairns explains desikoda, a Southeast Asian concept coined by geographer Terry McGee about 20 years ago. The term, from Sanskrit roots meaning village and city, describes how countryside and city intertwine in Southeast Asia, where Western terms like suburb and sprawl fail to capture rice agriculture's role in shaping space and society.
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Okay, so desikoda is a very interesting term. It's about maybe 20, 25 years old.
It's really. It comes out of two existing words, very old words that come from Sanskrit, desa and kota. They're imported into Malay, and they're combined together by the geographer Terry McGee. And he combines them for a very important effect because he feels that current terminology like the countryside or the city, or even the suburb, or even concepts like sprawl are not really adequate for thinking about this relationship between the countryside and the city in Southeast Asian regions. And he places special emphasis on the role of rice agriculture in complicating the conditions we find here. So it prompted him to develop another terminology, another theoretical vocabulary. And we're interested in that same kind of project because we feel that existing terminology simply is not adequate to what you find in this region. And that's for obvious reasons that emerged from American conditions of urbanization. And older terminology comes out of the European experience of city living and urbanization, urban development in Europe.
