East Asia Forum Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific http://www.eastasiaforum.org Asian cities in the 21st century 26th June, 2012 Author: Bharat Dahiya, UN-HABITAT and AIT The rapid demographic expansion of Asian cities that came with sustained economic growth made it a textbook example of the positive correlation between urbanisation and economic growth. Asian cities are now home to over half of the world’s urban population, or 1.76 billion people. Asia recorded the fastest rate of urban growth across all regions in the world during the period 1990 to 2010, from 31.5 per cent to 42.2 per cent — or in other words an increase of over 754 million people which is equal to the combined population of the US and the EU. Estimates show that Asia will reach 50 per cent urbanisation by 2026. As Asian cities continue to grow, they will face unprecedented challenges and unique opportunities. For example, Asian urbanisation is broad-based rather than concentrated in just a few cities, so one challenge lies in finding suitable solutions for balanced sub-national development. Sixty per cent of the region’s urban population lives in small- and medium-sized cities and will continue to do so for the next two decades. Metropolitan cities (with populations between 1 and 10 million) are home to a third of Asia’s urban population. Yet small- and medium-sized cities labour under the same imperative as metropolitan cities: both need to address the challenges of environmental management [1] and urban and regional planning and development, and both need to adapt their development strategies to their comparative advantage, particularly to their economic, socio-cultural and environmental resources. Given the crucial role they have played in the region’s economic transformation, Asian cities are now recognised as ‘engines of economic growth’ at both local and national levels. They have capitalised on the opportunities provided by their own demographic expansion and taken page 1 / 3