ABSTRACT
Over the past decades, our global economy has experienced a worldwide division of labour typified by, among other things, the shift of manufacturing operations from industrialized countries to a select number of emerging economies. It is argued that industrial globalization through spatial concentration of foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing has contributed to the emergence of mega-urban regions in the Global South (Douglass 2000). A mega-urban region may consist of a mega-city, referring to a metropolitan core with more than 10 million inhabitants, and their immediate suburbs. Most mega-urban regions are located in Asia and have played a dominant role in the domestic economies where they are located (Jones 2002). They also have become a key feature of the current global system of city-regions and urban structure (Brenner and Schmid 2011).
