ABSTRACT
This chapter explains urbanisation and the development problematique on Asia. Looming over all discussion of world urbanisation trends is the great volume of population that resides in, and will move to, the urban areas of Asia. By 2020, almost 80 percent of the world's urban poor will be in developing countries. They remain extremely vulnerable to the volatile nature of globalisation. Long-term United Nations projections estimate that the world's population will grow from 5.3 billion in 1990 and stabilise at about nine billion people by 2050. Most planners realise that the transactional revolution is strengthening the processes leading to the greater centralisation of the urban system, to the extent that urban development is increasingly concentrated in a few urban regions within a country. Globalisation processes are also affecting the global and regional mode of economic operations.
