ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s, McGee enlarged the Asian metropolitan region hypothesis by arguing that a new distinctive form of urban region was emerging in the margins of the city cores, the desakota region.1 This work extended the concept of the metropolitan region to include a much greater spatial spread of urban activities into areas that were still characterized by rural activities. Research that built upon this idea revealed that many Asian extended metropolitan regions (EMRs) fitted this model, finding that they were typically large urbanizing regions, sometimes stretching over 100 or more kilometers and often located between and including two existing major urban centers. They are characterized by intense concentrations and flows of both people and commodities, highly mixed agricultural and non-agricultural activities, and an intense interaction between rural and urban areas.2 In the early 1990s, a group of scholars conducted several case studies into Chinese EMRs, demonstrating the key features and dynamics of growth within them.3 Wang’s work during the 1990s identified the emergence of the Shenyang-Dalian (S-D) EMR as an urban corridor sharing many of the major characteristics of other Asian EMRs, including intensive rural-urban interaction and rapid development of non-agricultural sectors, not only in the margins of Shenyang and Dalian, but also the corridor between these two centers.4
