Abstract
Within the global urban-rural dynamics, Asia is distinguished by the rapid growth of its giant cities, which are transforming their erstwhile non-urban and urbanizing hinterlands and giving rise to individual city-regions. This unique growth-spread areal entity—the Asian megacity region (MCR), a distinct urbanization phenomenon—is the focus of this volume. I see the MCR as a single system entity, one which is urbanizing the landscape around a core megacity, and is characterized by varying ‘urban-rural interfaces’ (URI) that span the entire region and evolve over time. I treat the MCR as a conceptual entity, distinct from the geographically diverse individual megacity regions of Asia. The argument inherent in this work is that the Asian MCR deserves more attention, in particular from the perspectives of sustainable development, than it has historically been accorded. Moreover, concerns such as conceptual and definitional ambiguities, conflated use of different scalar configurations of city-regions, data issues, fragmented governance, and the dearth of a unified multidimensional focus in city-regional planning will need to be addressed to optimize our understanding of the Asian MCR. These themes are touched on in this introductory chapter as I state the spirit and purpose of my endeavor, propose a three-pronged approach, and note that an application of this approach, an illustrative empirical analysis of the National Capital Region-Delhi (NCR-D), concludes this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
The phrases, ‘rural-urban’ and ‘urban-rural’ are used interchangeably throughout the volume.
- 2.
Although somewhat tangential to the topic at hand, I cannot resist including the following observation by Koppel (1991) for its insightful and thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of Asia. In questioning the traditional rural-urban dichotomy, Koppel noted some of what he saw as the “antonymous pairs” of convergence and divergence taking place simultaneously in Asia: “(1) converging material cultures coexisting with diverging ethical-religious cultures; (2) converging ‘commercialization’ of economic relations coexisting with diverging social and political foundations of exchange; (3) converging patterns of social practice coexisting with diverging patterns of cultural interpretation; (4) converging patterns of class formation and political expression coexisting with diverging patterns of economic organizations and social movement; and (5) converging patterns of human settlement and material culture coexisting with diverging patterns of social community and historical consciousness.” “The rural-urban dichotomy can certainly array the processes referenced in the pairs, but in doing so do ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ become metaphor ically translucent lenses diffusing considerably more light than they focus?” questions Koppel (1991, p. 49)
- 3.
The terms interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and such, each with their own individual and obvious connotations, are used interchangeably in this volume.
- 4.
In his article on scalar issues, Purcell (2003, p. 329) proposes that “…islands of practice are not constructed of theoretical differences so much as they are the result of methodological practice” and suggests collaborative research as one way to bridge the islands.
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Mookherjee, D. (2020). Introduction. In: The Asian Megacity Region. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42649-1_1
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