ABSTRACT
Urban and regional planners have conceptually isolated the city from the intricacies of a rapidly evolving world economy. The macroeconomic underpinnings of trade and investment theory, and particularly the neoclassical belief in the self-regulation of the market, were distant from the community-level intervention at which urban planners worked. Policy responses to the international impacts on city systems have been slow to develop, although many countries in the region appear to have given some priority to the development of national urbanization strategies. Much of the contemporary literature on the development of the urban informal sector has also pursued themes emanating from the dependency perspective. The "world cities" concept is an extrapolation from the literature on the internationalization of production applied to the top end of the urban hierarchy. In comparison, urbanization and rural-to-urban migration rates in Southeast Asia are much slower, and urban areas contain much less than 50 percent of those countries' populations.
