Shopping areas in Asia are about the experience, not just the retail sale.

[grain of salt, and some guffawing for a certain item on this list]

"Makoko Floating School. Lagos, Nigeria. The school that floats.
Ørestad Gymnasium. Copenhagen, Denmark. The school in a cube.
Big Picture Learning. Providence, Rhode Island. The school in the real world.
Egalia Pre-school. Stockholm, Sweden. The school without gender.
AltSchool. San Francisco, California. The school of Silicon Valley.
Sra Pou Vocational School. Sra Pou village, Cambodia. The school for building community.
P-TECH High School. Brooklyn, New York. The school that bridges high school and college.
Steve Jobs School. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The school that thinks different.
Brightworks School. San Francisco, California. The school that teaches dangerously.
Carpe Diem Schools. Aiken, Ohio. The school built like an office.
Innova Schools. Peru. The school built by world-class designers.
Blue School. New York, New York. The school fusing compassion and creativity.
Samaschool. San Francisco, California. The school that says it's not too late."

"Studio Revolt is an independent artist run media lab that produces films, videos, installations and performance projects in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The media lab serves as a collaborative space for performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali and filmmaker Masahiro Sugano. Through his films, Sugano reconsiders cultural and political norms that have constricted our imagination and dulled our senses. Ali performs unapologetic poems and declarations of the self beyond fixed identities and borders. Together their works open up possibilities for people to exist outside of conventional narratives. Studio Revolt takes it a step further by urging viewers to become participants and stake their claim in this world.

Launched in Phnom Penh
Studio Revolt launched in June 2011 during Anida Yoeu Ali’s U.S. Fulbright research year. While residing in Cambodia, the studio collaborates with emerging Cambodian and deported artists to assert a new generation of narratives. Together we will shape a new movement that frees Cambodian imagination and consciousness beyond war and poverty. This is not another school or NGO. Media-based work does not mean more documentaries. Studio Revolt focuses on fiction and creative storytelling. With over 3,000 registered NGOs here, a culture of dependency leaves Cambodians with no sense of ownership. We want to see Cambodian people own their creativity, narratives, and ultimately their destinies. Imagination is a means to ownership. Fiction unlocks possibilities for the human condition. Cambodia needs narratives beyond the ones imposed on them through media practices they did not define or create. We do not want to just hand out tools or tell local Cambodians what is needed. Instead we would like to instill inspiration, desire, and esteem. We position ourselves as catalysts for competition, collaboration and participation, not as leaders or experts. We identify as part of the unfolding contemporary narrative. We are here to co-own and collaborate.

More About the Artists
Performance artist, writer and global agitator, Anida Yoeu Ali is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Utilizing video, installation, sound, and performance, her works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. Anida is a recipient of the 2011 U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to Cambodia where her art and research focuses on creation mythologies and birthing stories of Khmer women. She earned her B.F.A. in Graphic Design from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and her M.F.A. in Studio Arts/Performance from School of the Art Institute Chicago.

Born in Osaka, Japan, Masahiro Sugano came to the states in 1990 with an itch to do one thing: make movies! Masahiro, a Sundance Film Festival alum, is an award winning filmmaker whose accolades stretch from a Student Academy Award nomination in 1997 to his most recent award as the 2010 grand prize recipient for LinkTV’s One Chicago One Nation online film competition. After an international run at film festivals in Pusan, Singapore and Buenos Aires, Masahiro’s first feature length film ART OF LOVE was distributed on DVD. He earned a B.A. in philosophy from California State University (Northridge) and an M.F.A. in film/video/animation from the University of Illiniois (Chicago). Masahiro currently resides in Phnom Penh Cambodia where he is embarking on his second feature length film project.

Resident artist Kosal Khiev is a poet, tattoo artist, and survivor of the US prison system. Born in a Thai refugee camp, Kosal’s family fled to the U.S in 1981. At age 16, Kosal was arrested in a gang fight, charged with attempted murder, then sentenced to 16 years. While in prison, spoken word became his creative channel to tell his own story and transform his anger, regrets, and experiences into a poetic art form. In 2011, the U.S. government deported him to Cambodia, a country he had never been. Kosal lives as an exiled American in Phnom Penh where he continues to share his compelling story and art at open mics, universities, and public stages."

[via: http://www.designboom.com/art/the-buddhist-bug-project-travels-through-cambodia-01-20-2014/ ]

"in a collaboration among the NGOs, building trust international, habitat for humanity and karuna cambodia three sustainable housing projects have been completed on the outskirts of phnom penh in cambodia. the projects bring new life to communities and serve as viable options for construction and delivery for low income families in the area. in 2013, three international architecture firms were announced as joint winners in a competition that envisioned a better standard of living in this part of the world. the brief called for a $2000 house that could withstand flooding and offer a safe and secure environment. the different solutions gave families the chance to choose one that related to their specific lifestyle needs."

"One billion people worldwide live in slums, a number that will likely double by 2030. The characteristics of slum life vary greatly between geographic regions, but they are generally inhabited by the very poor or socially disadvantaged. Slum buildings can be simple shacks or permanent and well-maintained structures but lack clean water, electricity, sanitation and other basic services. In this post, I've included images from several slums including Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, the second largest slum in Africa (and the third largest in the world); New Building slum in central Malabo, Equatorial Guinea; Pinheirinho slum - where residents recently resisted police efforts to forcibly evict them; and slum dwellers from Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi, India. India has about 93 million slum dwellers and as much as 50% of New Delhi's population is thought to live in slums, 60% of Mumbai."

"The U.S. has a long, complicated, and dark history of arming rebel groups around the world…Argentina and Honduras…Chile…Nicaragua…Khmer Rouge…

…cycle is a familiar one: rather than commit American lives to a murky & uncertain conflict, White House asks CIA to find or create local proxies that can do the fighting for us. We invariably find the most skilled fighters, most ruthless killers, who can best challenge or outright topple whatever regime—often communist, usually despotic & deserving of ouster—has earned American ire. But the conflict often escalates & turns for worse…

Violence begets violence, instability begets instability, and the U.S. tactic of arming rebels has been incredibly successful at fomenting both, but has done little to end either, often creating problems far outsizing those we originally meant to solve.

Neither the French nor the British share this sordid history with the U.S."

"Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching."

"As the teeming cities of the developing world increasingly exclude their slum-dwellers, John Gravois reports from Phnom Penh, where a new prosperity is transforming what was once a city of squatters."

"collecting schwag from Web 2.0 companies and sending it to kids in Cambodia"