ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes urbanization trends, urban population growth, city size, and urban concentration in Asia, then turns to the projection of these trends. The low levels of urbanization in South, Southeast, and centrally planned Asia resulted from high rural growth rates rather than from the failure of cities to reach substantial sizes. Despite the slow pace of urbanization for Asia as a whole, Asia's urban populations have been growing at very high rates, and the proportions of urban populations in the large cities have been increasing. Andrei Rogers, using a disaggregated projection model with age-specific rates, found that at some periods during a nation's urbanization transition its urban population may grow primarily as a consequence of net urban in-migration, whereas at other periods natural increase is the major contributor. The chapter also summarizes the UN projections only to the year 2000 because beyond that date the projections are much less reliable.
