Megacities of Asia Part III: The rise of the 'Megaregion'
Urbanisation is changing the face of Asia but what’s next for the continent’s city dwellers, asks Vanessa Collingridge, in the last of a three-part series
“Never in the history of urbanisation have we found ourselves living in cities this big!” proclaims Professor Chris Webster, dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Despite a 30-year career studying the built environment, he still manages to sound impressed.
“What we have now is a completely new discussion about transport, communication and the structure and systems of cities; even about the meaning of international borders.”
The new urban structures to which Webster refers are what he calls “megaclusters” or “megaregions” – the startling phenomenon of supersized cities expanding into one another to create vast urban corridors from Delhi to Mumbai, or Hong Kong to the furthest reaches of the Pearl River Delta. It’s a phenomenon that is happening worldwide but particularly in Asia and the so-called “global south”, where the speed and scale of urbanisation are leaving analysts stunned and urban governments swamped.
And it’s little surprise. Four years ago, the world reached a tipping point; humans became an urban species, with more than half of us living in towns and cities. According to the United Nations, Asia’s urban population is set to soar from 1.9 billion in 2011 to 3.3 billion by 2050, while Africa and Asia combined will account for 86 per cent of the increase in the world’s urban population. It’s a shift, not only in terms of population but also in terms of potential, that has sent ripples of anxiety throughout the corridors of power.
“Because of the ambiguity of the situation and the speed of development, onlookers like the United Nations and World Bank are seriously concerned that some cities are grossing out – they’ve got too nebulous, too large – and it’s causing a kind of urban existential panic,” says Webster.
“It’s happened several times over the last 40 years or so, when cities first topped populations of a million; when Istanbul and Cairo – right on the borders of Europe – reached 10 million; now China is setting the benchmark and it’s not so much the 10 million that’s raising questions but where it’s going beyond that.”