ABSTRACT
Despite the tremendously increased speed and scale of global urbanization since the end of the Second World War, the world is still in the midst of its urban transition. Those labeled as the developed countries of the rich world have essentially completed their shifts from rural to urban, with 75 to 80 percent or more of their citizens now living in urban areas. Yet much of the developing world is projected to continue large-scale urban growth for the next few decades, so much so as to more than double both the number of urban dwellers and the total amount of urbanized territory on the planet between now and the middle of this century (Angel, 2012). For the developing, urbanizing countries of Southeast Asia much of this shift is occurring across wide swaths of territory on the peripheries of major metropolitan regions. One anticipated outcome of these processes of periurbanization is the formation of extensive metropolitan regions with multiple millions of residents. Because of their scale and speed, such changes are without precedent, thus leaving us with little basis for envisioning the nature of urban life in these places in the future. Such territories are clearly transitional, but without historical precedent for anticipating this sort of urban future, it is difficult to say what this might be a transition to.
