ABSTRACT
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the urban settlement of the Asia-Pacific region is its very large cities. They are found in circumstances as diverse as the eastern Pacific Rim at Los Angeles and San Francisco, in the west in Bangkok, Jakarta and Hong Kong (and its adjacent Pearl River delta), in the north around Shanghai and Tokyo, and in the south around Melbourne and Sydney. These urban regions are intensively settled and spatially integrated units that spread discontinuously over long distances across local statistical or administrative borders. They create a major public policy challenge in terms of management. They are variously labelled ‘mega city’, ‘megalopolis’, ‘extended metropolitan region’, ‘mega city-region’ and ‘global city-region’. These terms are applied to a series of large cities, such as the Pearl River Delta (Sit and Yang 1997) and the Tokyo-Osaka Corridor (Yeung 2000) and other axes of urban development where cities are clustered in narrow corridors, often along coastal strips (Rimmer 1991) and across national borders (Heikila 2002; Artibise 1995). These terms are also applied to the large agglomeration associated with individual cities like Shanghai, Bangkok, Tokyo and Jakarta. It is the latter, geographically smaller, unit that is the focus of the current research and the label to be used here for these areas is mega city-region, acknowledging their large physical and economic size, as well as the urban character of a region of a nation. This chapter will explore ways of describing and understanding the development of these mega city-regions.
