Over the past half century, Penang has grown from a largely rural state into an almost completely urbanized conurbation. The explosive land-use changes, rising civil society and environmental vulnerabilities, including flooding and landslides, have intertwined with the dynamics of urban transformations spreading far beyond the city's boundaries. In this sense, Penang is illustrative of Asia's rapidly urbanizing and globalizing cities which pose significant challenges to the development of socially and ecologically just futures. As such, the book has sought to document the ways in which Penang's residents are actively involved in the remaking of their city, and towards what end. Its central intent is thus to shed light on the innovative forms of urban governance, and participatory planning being pursued in the state, with the hope that doing so will inform a critical assessment of the potential for more sustainable approaches to urbanization to prevail.

Theoretically, this book has sought to illustrate how an LPE approach is useful for breaking down the dichotomies between bounded places, types of places (for example ‘cities’, towns, rural areas, etc) and scales (for example local/ global). Landscape is a hybrid concept which allows tracing the social, biophysical processes and/ or infrastructure networks under consideration wherever they may lead, whether or not that is within the boundaries of ‘the city’, or even the nation (see Lepawsky et al, 2015; Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan, 2017). The attention to the landscape histories of urbanization in Penang problematizes assumed distinctions between nature and culture, and illustrates how cultural and natural dimensions of landscapes are intertwined. In this way, the book brings UPE analysis in new directions, and illustrates the the changing spatial dynamics of Asian urbanism and their socio-ecological implications.

By way of an extended vignette, this concluding chapter uses the case of Jerejak Island, which is a small, uninhabited island off the southeastern coast of Penang, to reflect on the key themes discussed in the book, and competing visions for Penang's future. The island has considerable cultural heritage, as it has, in the past, served as an immigration quarantine for Malaya, a leprosarium, tuberculosis sanatorium, prison for political prisoners and – most recently – a resort. While some of the structures associated with these facilities have been demolished, many are still there, slowly being reclaimed by nature.