Books

This is a study of the management problems experienced by selected metropolitan cities in South and East Asia and of the approaches adopted in resolving them. Although the region contains many of the world’s developing countries, it is not an exception to the universal trends in urbanization, which have had a massive impact on its metropolitan cities. Apart from Tokyo, the cities concerned tend to dominate the economic and political scene in their respective countries, but for the purposes of this discussion it is not inappropriate to refer to them and the problems they face as being broadly metropolitan. Urban geographers and planners now tend to use the term ‘metropolitan’ to refer to a large identifiable area of continuous urbanization consisting of several administrative jurisdictions. Demographers today often classify cities with populations of more than one million people as metropolitan, and in common usage the term is widely employed to symbolize social, economic, and political status. All of these characteristics apply to the cities studied here.