CIAO DATE: 04/02

East Asian Urbanization: Patterns, Problems, and Prospects

Two interwoven processes–urbanization and globalization–circumscribe contemporary social, political, and economic transformations taking place in East Asia.1 While governments, businesses, and communities are caught up in one of the most intensive and condensed processes of urbanization in world history, the forces propelling much of the expansion of cities and urban networks now operate on an international plane. Urban-oriented investments in production for world markets, global intra-firm commodity trade within transnational corporate networks, and the hyper-circulation of finance capital are fundamental features of what has been summarized as the "local-global" context of development. Urbanization and globalization have become interdependent and mutually reinforcing: the shaping of urban form and the dominant activities within a given city reflect its mode of linkage with globalized circuits of capital; at the same time, these circuits require a structuring of the built environment to create the physical geography of international urban networks needed for real-time decisionmaking on a global scale.

As the world enters its first urban century, a fundamental feature of the current era along the Asian arc of the Pacific Rim will be the accelerated formation of very large urban agglomerations and connecting inter-urban corridors. Recent UN (1994) population research shows that the world's urban population is growing at a rate of 2.5 percent per annum, three times that of rural population (0.8 percent per annum). As a result, urban areas are absorbing 61 million people each year compared with 25 million for rural areas. Half of the world population will live in urban areas by 2005, and two decades later in 2025 more than three-fifths will be urban. Of the 2.5 billion people living in urban areas in the mid-1990s, two-thirds resided in middle and lower-income countries.

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