Managing the chaotic city–social cohesion: New forms of urban governance and the challenge for East Asia

Chaos is no more a prominent feature of East Asian urbanization than it is of urban settlements in other parts of the world. Some East Asian cities are, however, growing at an extraordinary rate and some villages have transmogrified into major cities in the space of a decade. The scale and pace of these changes present new challenges for urban management, urban planning and occasional major transformations in social life and the structure of civil society. But, of course, this is only a partial picture of urbanization in the region. There are also the more mature and relatively settled cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where notions of disorder and chaos hardly seem apt.