ABSTRACT
Over the past several decades, Southeast Asia has experienced rapid urban-ization on a massive scale. With just 14 percent of Southeast Asians living in urban areas after World War Two, over 40 percent of the approxi-mately 600 million Southeast Asians now live in cities, a percentage that is expected to exceed 55 percent by 2025 (United Nations 1995). Whereas Southeast Asia’s urban growth since W WII has largely occurred in primate cities (King 2008), over the past two decades, urban growth has also taken the form of new cities built from a tabula rasa. New cities have been con-structed primarily to nurture the manufacturing industry (Batam industrial estates in Indonesia, Shah Alam in Malaysia) and to encourage high-tech ambitions (Malaysia’s Cyberjaya and the Multimedia Super Corridor, Can Tho City in Vietnam).
