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Here, we suggest that all should be aware that we are indeed living in "our modern" cities, and thus put it forward as the theme of the 6th mAAN international conference. No architecture, no city, in fact, no element in our culture is pure. Tangible and intangible, all the cultural elements that constitute our living environment are a result of a conscious and unconscious, as well as individual and collective process of appropriation lasting over a long period of time. To say this so definitively does not mean to take a stance of forgetting or even praising the colonial past. It is, on the contrary, our attempt to overcome the nationalistic and ethnocentric attitudes that simplistically rejects any built environment inherited from the colonial past. In overcoming these attitudes, mAAN comes to a new, basic understanding of our historical urban heritage.
By holding our conference in Tokyo, a hybrid city that most typically embodies multicultural appropriation, we would like to re-recognize this process, which has been ceaselessly going on here since the time of Edo (the former name of Tokyo prior to 1868). By newly re-appropriating the various facets and elements of this process, we thus can re-appreciate this living urban environment as "our modern" city. We must also remember the fact that this process of mutual appropriation does not occur only between "Us" and "Other" or among "Others," but is exactly the nature of dynamic human existence that can be observed within any community-a city, for example.
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