International Planning Studies

ISSN: 1356-3475 (Print) 1469-9265 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cips20

City unbound: emerging mega-conurbations in

Asia

John Friedmann & André Sorensen

To cite this article: John Friedmann & André Sorensen (2019) City unbound:
emerging mega-conurbations in Asia, International Planning Studies, 24:1, 1-12, DOI:
10.1080/13563475.2019.1555314

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2019.1555314

Published online: 10 Jan 2019.

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INTERNATIONAL PLANNING STUDIES
2019, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 1–12
https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2019.1555314

INTRODUCTION

City unbound: emerging mega-conurbations in Asia*

John Friedmann† and André Sorensen
Department of Human Geography, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Canada

Introduction
In key regions of Asia an unprecedented form of the urban is emerging, characterized by very high
population densities, unprecedented physical and demographic scales, and ever-increasing speeds of
urbanization. The goal of the project informing this special issue is to initiate a research agenda
focused on this emerging urban scale in Asia, already evident in Japan and China, but also incipient
in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere. In multiple locations
we see the emergence of massive pluricentric urban regions of 20 to well over 100 million population
that are characterized by: rapid population growth; high population densities ranging from 600 to
over 1000 per hectare on average; increasing time–space compression produced by the spread of
new technologies (rapid rail systems, limited access expressways, fibre optics, smart phones, etc.);
and extensive periurbanization associated with the merging of multiple, formerly distinct, metropo-
litan areas into new scales of conurbation.
A conurbation is a region comprising a number of cities, large towns, and other urbanized and/or
nominally rural areas which, through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to
form a continuous urban and economically developed area that functions as a single economic
entity. The term was introduced by Scottish sociologist Patrick Geddes in his Cities in Evolution
(1915) to refer to a new urban form, which he had observed in places such as Germany’s Ruhr
and the Netherlands’ ‘Randstad.’ Some forty years later, the French geographer Jean Gottmann envi-
sioned a 700 km-long chain of closely linked cities from Boston to Washington, DC, which he called
Megalopolis (Gottmann 1957). Our intent is thus neither to coin a new term, nor to claim that this is
a new phenomenon. Many labels have already been suggested, from megalopolis (Geddes 1915;
Gottmann 1957), to extended metropolitan region (McGee 1991), mega-urban region (McGee
and Robinson 1995; Douglass 2000), megaregion (Hoyler and Harrison 2015) and others. Yet we
argue that the unprecedented scale and intensity of urbanization in Asia raises a number of pressing
research questions that have not yet been addressed, and that this proposed project on mega-con-
urbations is designed to explore.

CONTACT André Sorensen sorensen@utsc.utoronto.ca Department of Human Geography, University of Toronto Scar-
borough, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1C 1A4
*This special issue is dedicated to the memory of John Friedmann, scholar, teacher, poet, and friend whose expansive ideas and
personal warmth were an inspiration to all of us. This project was initiated by Friedmann in 2015, and developed with Sorensen
over a year of frequent email exchanges and drafting of this conceptual framework. We organized an initial workshop in Sep-
tember of 2016, to explore these ideas in collaboration with a small group of scholars who are actively researching Asian urban-
ization processes, to test out the strengths and weaknesses of these ideas. This was intended to be the first stage of a larger
research collaboration on mega-urbanization in Asia. John passed away in June of 2017, just as we were receiving the final drafts
of papers, and after we had completed revision of the Introduction and part one (The challenges posed by mega-conurbation) of
this paper (which draw heavily on the conceptual framework sent to workshop participants in August of 2016), and which we had
submitted to International Planning Studies in May of 2017 as a co-authored proposal for this special issue. Part two (Initial con-
tributions to mega-conurbations research) was written by Sorensen in Fall of 2018 after all the papers had been accepted for
publication. Participants in the workshop in addition to those contributing papers to this special issue included Delik Hudalah,
Aseem Inam, Kuni Kamizaki, Roger Keil, Michael Leaf, Raj Reddy, Ivy Wong, and Anthony Yeh, all of whom contributed to the
discussion and debates.
†
Deceased.
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. FRIEDMANN AND A. SORENSEN

Over the last two decades there has been growing interest in the emergence of mega-conurbations
in Asia. In the early 1990s it was suggested that a key factor differentiating such regions from those in
Europe and North America was the fact of their growth into high-density rural areas based on rice
agriculture, resulting in enormous rural populations being quickly integrated into urban economic
networks (Ginsberg, Koppel, and McGee 1991; McGee 1991; McGee and Robinson 1995). That basic
insight gave a new relevance to Geddes’ concept of conurbation in the Asian context, and led to a
growing body of work on the emerging mega-urban regions in Asia (Douglass 2000; Friedmann
2005; Laquian 2005; Jones and Douglass 2008; Zheng et al. 2009), and processes of urbanization
in periurban areas (Simon 2008; Friedmann 2011; Webster 2011; Xu 2015; Labbé 2016; Leaf 2016;
Sorensen 2016).
We suggest that a primary characteristic of these emerging urban regions in Asia is that they are
conurbations created by the growth and knitting together of multiple metropolitan areas into huge
pluricentric urban regions that function in at least some respects as integrated urban entities. We suggest
that for a number of reasons, this form of urbanization is rapidly becoming more prevalent in Asia, is
occurring at ever-larger scales, and in many places is happening at unprecedented speeds. Mega-con-
urbation is therefore an apt label for this increased scale of urbanization. We argue that this phenom-
enon must be better understood, and that new approaches should be developed to study it. We regard
these mega-conurbations as a major challenge for urban and more specifically planning research.
An urban form with these dimensions and spatial structure (pluricentric, with partly overlapping
periurban zones) can be said to constitute a single, interactive urban system that can be further
described by at least nine categories of metabolic flows that are spatially mediated from the most
micro- to the most macro-scale, including: People flows; Capital flows; Commodity flows; Information
flows, from face to face to electronically mediated in cyberspace (the noösphere); Food flows; Water
flows; Electric energy flows; Transportation flows; Flows of solid and liquid waste and air pollution.
Given these characteristics, a mega-conurbation can be said to be a largely open, self-organizing,
and adaptive system of (1) physical structures that are partly visible and partly invisible; (2) human
beings acting both individually and through organizations; (3) institutions that structure patterns of
action and change; and (4) aggregations of urban spatial fabric and capital investment that are cre-
ated during processes of urbanization. Furthermore, in its totality, such a system is vitally dependent
on the natural systems in which it is embedded and from which it draws key inputs such as water, air,
food, and building materials, and is always profoundly structured by the geographical and political
settings in which it is located.
These mega-conurbations create distinctive patterns and processes of growth that challenge their
governance and planning. Fundamental is that the merging of multiple metropolitan cores produces
an exponential increase in the area affected by periurbanization pressures, as discussed below. It is in
the transformation of these extensive areas – which in Asia are almost always already relatively den-
sely settled – that most conflicts over urban growth play out.
We see this emerging scale and pattern of mega-conurbation as a new form of the human habitat
that poses distinctive challenges not only for urban research, but also for urban governance and plan-
ning. Our aim is to draw the attention of policy makers to this new scale of the urban in a number of
Asian countries. We ask: To what extent do these mega-conurbations function as integrated socio-
economic entities? Are they becoming functionally differentiated? How have these mega-conurba-
tions evolved historically? How do processes of growth of mega-conurbation shape conflicts over
land development and capital investment in urban space? How does this emerging scale of urban-
ization affect understandings of urban place, and the livelihood strategies of communities caught
up in them? What can be the roles of governing institutions, including planning, at this new scale
of the urban, given the jurisdictional fragmentation of these areas, and the immense challenges of
negative externalities such as pollution, congestion, inequality, and local environmental transform-
ations in periurban areas that accompany these processes? What kinds of ‘Inter-Asian’ connections
exist between these mega-conurbations? Do planners from ‘actually existing mega-conurbations’
(such as those of Japan and the Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas) communicate with planners
 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING STUDIES 3

from ‘emerging mega-conurbations’ (like Vietnam’s Eastern Southern region and Red River Delta,
and in Taiwan, South Korea, and north-west Java)?
In September of 2016 the authors convened a workshop in Toronto of scholars working on issues
of mega-urbanization in Asia. The papers collected here are the initial product of that collaboration.
This introduction to the special issue is divided into two main sections. The first outlines the con-
ceptual framework proposed to the participants in our Toronto Workshop, which fall into five main
themes: complexity and planning; periurbanization; questions of efficiency; governance and plan-
ning; and comparative approaches. The second section introduces the papers that constitute the sub-
stantive contribution of this special issue.

The challenges posed by mega-conurbation

Complexity and planning
The combination of rapid large-scale growth, pluricentrism, and periurbanization suggests that
mega-conurbations should be regarded as complex socio-spatial systems (Roo and Silva 2010; Por-
tugali 2012; Batty 2013). These systems, inter alia, exhibit a great deal of self-organization, so that a
change originating at any one point tends to ripple through the system, producing unanticipated
changes, both small and large, at many other points within and beyond the system itself. Another
way to put this is to say that the actually evolving city is to a considerable extent structuring itself
in ways that are largely unforeseen and often unintended. No single actor within such a system
has a comprehensive knowledge of the system’s actually existing state or of its ongoing transforma-
tive processes. Given a capitalist market economy, this creates a turbulent decision environment. At
any given moment, millions upon millions of large and small decisions are being made by decision
units – individuals, corporations, governmental entities – that, in a general way, but in no sense per-
fectly, are mutually adapting to each others’ moves which, in turn, trigger still further adjustments
and adaptations, thus generating a continuous stream of consequences for systemic performance.
The socio-spatial patterning of such a system is thus neither completely knowable nor, in the longer
term, predictable (Lindblom 1965). Under these conditions, infrastructure decisions tend to follow
rather than lead demand, and the roles of governance and planning processes in shaping patterns of
change must be questioned (see Friedmann paper this issue).
In particular, it seems clear that while the relevance of the traditional concerns of planning with
negative externalities and the long-run implications of short-run patterns of change is increased, the
capacity to meaningfully influence them may be reduced. Whereas economists and modellers (Krug-
man 1996; Batty 2013) tend to assume that complex systems will mutually adjust and produce
efficient outcomes, in fact there are many reasons why this does not occur. Adaptive processes
depend on multiple feedback loops and information flows that are widely dispersed among potential
decision-making units such as individuals and private as well as public organizations. But for a var-
iety of reasons, incremental adjustments to change often fail to occur or occur too slowly, resulting in
large negative externalities or diseconomies. As earlier rounds of rapid urbanization have shown,
there is often a significant lag or disconnect between the generation of negative externalities and
the response of self-organizing systems either in terms of remedial solutions or slower growth.
Such disconnects can be extremely costly, leading to gross economic inefficiencies, impaired health
outcomes, high social costs, environmental damage, and long-term quality of life challenges. In
addition, there is the very real possibility that specific mega-conurbations will exceed the carrying
capacity of the natural environment on which they depend, to the point where the natural system
fails in toto or in part and can no longer be reconstituted.

Periurban growth
In most urban studies, the periurban zones of large central cities are not yet treated as fully urban and
are often confused with suburbs, a concept whose connotation in Asia is quite different from what it
4 J. FRIEDMANN AND A. SORENSEN

is generally understood to be in western countries. Periurban zones are the spaces into which a core
city expands, sometimes formally by becoming administratively integrated with the municipality at
the centre, or else by simply extending outliers of the central city, which may or may not be admin-
istratively linked to it, such as airports, new towns, water reservoirs, protected natural areas, rec-
reational areas, transportation corridors, intensive but interstitial commercial agriculture, major
institutional spaces such as research hubs, schools and prisons, space-extensive industries, migrant
settlements and many others. The landscape of the periurban is thus one of mixed and often com-
peting land uses (Friedmann 2011; Webster 2011).
In Asian mega-conurbations with their overall high average density, the periurban zones of neigh-
bouring core cities will collide and even to some extent overlap in a process that might be called the
‘fusion of urban horizons,’ which leads to the continuous urban skein or web that characterizes the
mega-conurbation as a whole. Periurban zones can thus be thought of as zones of transition from an
originally rural to a progressively urban character and land use. They will tend to have a lower but stea-
dily increasing demographic density than the urban cores that they surround, as well as an already exist-
ing population that includes villages, small towns, as well as economic activities that have not yet been
completely drawn into the colonizing urbanism of near-by urban centres. Long before becoming visibly
urban in character, changing land values and property ownership in periurban areas often have trans-
formative impacts on spatial, economic, and social systems. On what terms are these areas ‘becoming
urban,’ and how are the benefits and costs of these processes distributed (Friedmann 2011)?
The nature and patterns of periurbanization often have long-term impacts on patterns of urban
growth. The institutions mediating these processes are highly varied between jurisdictions and
countries, and much of the drama of urbanization in Asia takes place in these interstitial zones,
as does a major share of land development profit. These areas are therefore invariably zones of
intense change and conflict between competing actors and between conflicting development
approaches and projects. In these contests, the institutions structuring land ownership, capital
investment in property development, and the creation of the myriad public infrastructures, spaces,
and realms essential to urban life are decisive in structuring outcomes. These urbanization processes
also have powerful impacts on processes of institutional development, with urbanization often accel-
erating processes of institutional change (Sorensen 2016; Sorensen 2018).
We consider that a fundamental process in mega-conurbations is the ongoing production of new
urban space, and the governance of public and private capital investment in those processes. Differ-
ent jurisdictions have widely divergent capacities to regulate and manage capital investment in the
production of urban space. A key differentiator between mega-conurbations is therefore likely to be
governance capacity to regulate and coordinate these processes.
Central to any understanding of the governance and planning challenges of emerging mega-con-
urbations must be a recognition of their emergence during relatively compressed and intense periods
of urbanization. Although building on much longer-term patterns and institutions of urban growth,
currently emerging mega-conurbations are characterized by greatly accelerated urbanization pro-
cesses and their rapid expansion to new scales of urbanization. As discussed next, this can contribute
to a weaker influence of feedback effects because of the increased significance of time lags in
responses to emerging diseconomies. But compressed time frames have a number of other significant
impacts as well. These include widened disjunctures between actors’ mental image and understand-
ing of the functional urban region and the rapidly changing reality, and increased difficulty of coor-
dinating rapid changes across sectors and spaces, as multiple challenges emerge and must be
managed simultaneously within short time horizons for decisions or adjustments to accommodate
functionally interlinked processes. This increases the urgency of understanding the fundamental
questions of efficiency and inefficiency, the drivers and biases of existing self-organizing processes,
and the potential opportunities for meaningful governance and planning interventions.
 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING STUDIES 5

Are mega-conurbations performing efficiently?

We have described mega-conurbations as open and largely self-organizing, adaptive urban systems
of unprecedented scale, high density, and rapid growth. The self-organizing nature of these systems
takes place within an existing system of institutional (including legal and governance) constraints
that operate at varying degrees of efficiency. Speaking generally and on a system-wide basis, adaptive
processes depend on multiple feedback loops and information flows that are widely dispersed among
potential decision-making units such as individuals and private as well as public organizations. But
for a variety of reasons, this system of incremental adjustments to change often fails to occur, result-
ing in large negative externalities or diseconomies.1 As earlier rounds of rapid urbanization have
shown, there is often a significant lag or disconnect between the generation of negative externalities,
and the response of self-organizing systems either in terms of remedial solutions, changed behaviour,
or slower growth. Such disconnects can be extremely costly leading to gross economic inefficiencies,
impaired health outcomes, high social costs, increased social inequities, and long-term quality of life
challenges.
Examples of such diseconomies are legion. Many are manifest in shortages, breakdowns, and
distributional inequities in the major metabolic systems listed above. Another well-known cat-
egory of diseconomies stems from intolerable air, water, and soil pollution. A third category
arises from the lack of what Jürgen Habermas has called the public sphere and could be said
to be a failure of governance, which is by and large the situation in China and Vietnam
today. A fourth category includes inefficiencies that result from unnecessary duplication of infra-
structure investments resulting from the usually fragmented governance arrangements of mega-
conurbations and inter-city competition. These varied diseconomies are far from being the only
ones, however, and would seem to require the full attention of government, as they can easily
spin out of control.
It should also be noted that inefficiencies in system performance go beyond economic imbalances
and are, in fact, multiple. Efficiency (or inefficiency) needs to be measured by its effects on both econ-
omic and non-economic objectives of the central state, such as environmental sustainability and resi-
lience, specific equity considerations, and informed decision-making by governmental entities.
Moreover, inefficiencies often result from differential access to actionable information. When knowl-
edge is treated as a form of power, already powerful individuals and organizations are likely to have
privileged access to information otherwise unavailable to the mass of the population whose lives are
impacted by growing uncertainties. To put this another way, with respect to adaptive behaviour on
the part of potential actors, one can ask who actually has access to feedback and other strategic infor-
mation, and opportunities to exploit that access.
Finally, the term efficiency is often used in the singular, when it should be used in the plural. There
are multiple efficiencies, including engineering efficiency, economic efficiency, efficiency with respect
to the elimination of poverty, with respect to environmental conditions, with respect to public health,
with respect to the aesthetics of landscape, with respect to other potential objects of common interest
(as opposed to self-interest). Even in a perfect adaptive system there will be many changes that
require that actions be taken to countermand so-called negative externalities or diseconomies.
This raises the question of governability and governance.

Governance and planning

Mega-conurbations are a mental construct, and even responsible governments across the range of
local to national may not be convinced that the mega-conurbation of which they are a part consti-
tutes, in fact, an interdependent, dynamic whole whose performance generates huge economies and
diseconomies. A first task for academic researchers is therefore to present convincing evidence to
governing authorities that holistic interdependence is an incontrovertible fact, that internal relations
are actually as, or even more, important than external relations, and that the system as a whole
6 J. FRIEDMANN AND A. SORENSEN

generates efficiencies and inefficiencies that are more than the sum of its parts as they ripple through
the system.
Once such evidence has been presented, there remains the question of what strategic governance
arrangements might be most suitable to deal with systemic inefficiencies. One way to address dise-
conomies is through a metabolic approach. The nine metabolic flows identified earlier interact with
each other across the spatial extent of the mega-conurbation and will exhibit a certain degree of sys-
temic inefficiency or malfunctioning as outlined above. One of the tasks of academic research would
be to identify these inefficiencies and their sources, together with proposed system-wide approaches
to their rectification.
But in what ways can the overall efficiency – economic, social, environmental, and in decision-
making – be enhanced for any given mega-conurbation? This question cannot be answered in gen-
eral terms, but requires empirical research and experimentation of specific instances. There are,
moreover, multiple approaches, some of them indicated below, and answers will have to be sought
empirically and incrementally. Here is a provisional list of potential approaches to improving sys-
tem-wide governance of mega-conurbations:

. Hierarchical relations
. Networked relations involving multiple actors
. Co-evolutionary approaches (Boelens and de Roo 2016)
. Better real-time information flows
. Focusing on specific metabolic flows without attempting holistic approaches
. Addressing systemic breakdowns

Each of these approaches will inevitably be not only spatially but also institutionally mediated. In
the process of creating huge new urban areas, urban institutional frames create multiple enduring
patterns that become embedded in the patterns of thinking of actors, in infrastructure investments
and long-term debt-service and financing mechanisms, and in patterns of capital investment in
urban space and property. Such patterns tend to create institutional dynamics, capacities, and
path dependencies that profoundly influence patterns of change, and enable some approaches
while making others more difficult to imagine or implement. Comparative research is needed to bet-
ter understand the range of existing and possible approaches to these governance challenges.

Comparative approaches
Although so far the largest mega-conurbations are located in China, with important precursors in the
US and Japan’s Tokaido megalopolis region stretching from Tokyo to Osaka (see Sorensen paper this
issue), we expect that in future more such regions will emerge in South Asia (see Bjorkman and Ven-
kataramani paper this issue), South-east Asia (See Labbé, Harms, and Shatkin papers this issue), the
Middle East, and Africa, and that some will be transnational in scale (as seen already in the SiJoRi
triangle around Singapore). Any discussion of mega-conurbations must therefore adopt an explicitly
comparative approach. We are not concerned here only or even primarily with a Chinese phenom-
enon, but with an emerging scale and set of challenges that is likely to emerge elsewhere.
Major questions revolve around the timing and sequencing of the emergence of mega-conurba-
tions in different countries relative to processes of development, level of wealth, position in the
demographic transition, availability of public and private capital, and governance structure. It is
obvious that level of wealth will shape the available responses and capacities in different places.
But it is worth asking also whether there are also important differences between mega-conurbations
based on their pre-existing, i.e. historical spatial form and structure, their geography, and the timing
of urbanization relative to different measures of development, such as the creation of effective urban
public health measures, access to piped drinking water, health coverage, birthrates, infant mortality,
or level of literacy. Similarly, the sequencing of events is an important consideration in comparative
 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING STUDIES 7

studies. For example, mega-conurbations that establish city-regional governance and institutions for
achieving coordination in advance of rapid urbanization are likely to develop differently than those
that establish them during or after urbanization has taken place, or don’t establish them at all. It is
also likely that such differences will have significant impacts on governance capacity and outcomes.
Mega-conurbations in Asia are growing at unprecedented speed, and are incorporating vast new
areas into processes of urbanization through capital investment in land and infrastructure. These
processes are occurring at a particular moment in global urban history, when the returns on invest-
ment in productive industry are often declining, the international mobility of capital is increasing,
and an increasing share of investment is in urban property of all sorts. States and cities seeking
inward investment do everything they can to facilitate such investments, with sometimes scant
regard for the profound impacts these processes have for the displacement and dispossession of
existing communities, and in generating increasing inequalities in the distribution of wealth and
the costs and benefits of urbanization (Shatkin 2016). The enormous expansion of urban areas
that characterizes the emergence of mega-conurbations in Asia boosts economic growth and asset
accumulation with the profits inherent in urban land development, but the capacity of governments
to capture some of this value for public purposes and infrastructure is highly uneven (Ingram and
Hong 2012; Shatkin 2017).
Important questions remain about how these processes of change are impacting the societies and
communities that are caught up in them. How do people experience and negotiate their ever-shifting
place in mega-conurbations, particularly but not exclusively in the periurban areas that undergo the
most dramatic shifts from older patterns of land-use, property ownership, and place governance to
contemporary patterns of urban capital investment in land and urban space? How are these new pat-
terns and dynamics of life and livelihood experienced and perceived, and how do individuals and
communities respond to them? The assumption of self-regulating markets is that actors respond
to changes affecting their decision environment, interpret this information in a way that is relatively
accurate, and are able to take appropriate countermanding decisions of their own. However, each
actor, individual or collective, responds only to the extent that the changes coming to their attention
are believed to affect their immediate or long-term interests. And not all actors are equally capable of
doing so. The majority of the population is not so privileged: for many of them, changes all around
them merely increase the uncertainty of their lives. As a result, privileged actors tend to flourish,
while most inhabitants merely ‘get by’ or find their aspirations thwarted.
Finally, mega-conurbations are emerging during a period of both rapid natural demographic
increase and massive rural to urban migration. But over the next several decades, both sources of
new urban residents can be expected to decrease sharply, with projections of flat or declining
total population almost everywhere well before the end of this century. The current period of
rapid growth will thus almost certainly be succeeded by a much longer period of considerably slower
change, as was the case with the American eastern seaboard Megalopolis and as seen with the absol-
ute population declines of Japan’s Tokaido Megalopolis. Given current global population projec-
tions, the emergence of mega-conurbations should be understood as one aspect of the
culminating process of Asian urbanization. This implies that the patterns of development established
during the current period of urbanization are likely to have enduring impacts – especially in terms of
infrastructure building and the distributions of wealth and ownership of urban property. This
increases the urgency of understanding the questions of efficiency and inefficiency, distributions
of costs and benefits, the drivers and biases of existing self-organizing processes, and the potential
opportunities for meaningful governance and planning interventions in the present posed here.

Initial contributions to mega-conurbations research

The contributors to this special issue are a small group consisting of those who were able both to
attend the Toronto workshop, and to complete a paper in response to the research agenda outlined
above. The group included established and emerging scholars, all of whom have engaged in case
8 J. FRIEDMANN AND A. SORENSEN

study research of Asian urbanization at both the micro scale and from regional perspectives. We had
wide-ranging and provocative discussions, and agreed above all that much more work is necessary to
adequately respond to the questions posed here. The papers here are therefore conceived as a first
contribution to addressing some of the issues raised, from our own particular vantage points, and
are not intended or imagined as adding up to a single answer, or as a full response to the research
agenda and questions set out above.
In his contribution, Friedmann (2019) outlines his thinking about hyper-complexity and the gov-
ernance and planning challenges of mega-conurbations produced by their scale, density, speed of
development, and their multiplicity of governance and power centres. In what he describes as a
set of mini-essays, Friedmann first develops his interpretation of complexity, suggesting that so
far, complexity thinking and modelling provide limited guidance to planning, in part because our
knowledge of complex systems is constrained by our starting assumptions and by necessarily
inadequate data. Yet he suggests that even in such conditions of radical uncertainty, we still must
make choices. Drawing on a sketch of the Yangtze Delta as a hyper-complex, pluricentric and
fast-changing urban region, he considers the implications for spatial planning and urban govern-
ance, and outlines a set of principles for an approach to planning that may begin to come to
grips with the hyper-complexity of Asian mega-conurbations. He suggests first that spatial planning
should focus on an ‘extended present’ rather than on longer-term goals, and second that such efforts
should focus primarily on mitigating the negative externalities associated with hyper rapid growth.
But his main focus is on his third recommendation, for three levels of spatial planning: at the scale of
the mega-conurbation as a whole, at the meso (metropolitan or municipal) scale, and at the micro
scale of neighbourhood communities. He argues that of these the meso level is currently most estab-
lished, and that it is at the macro and micro scales that most effort should now be focused, and con-
cludes with his suggestions about how this may be accomplished.
Sorensen’s (2019) paper takes a different perspective than the others in this collection in that all
the other case studies examine urbanization processes that are only partly completed, and or still
accelerating, yet peak growth of Japan’s Tokaido mega-conurbation occurred a half-century ago,
and its population as a whole is now declining. This enables a historical perspective and the oppor-
tunity to analyze the urbanization process retroactively, which in some regards is much easier than
trying to understand the hurricane of mega-conurbation growth while it is still raging. The main
sections of the paper compare the major policy issues identified in the 1960s during peak growth
(pollution, urban sprawl, and competition between regions for a fair share of investment) with the
very different set of issues that seem in retrospect to have been most important (recurring real
estate booms and busts that eventually crippled the financial system, the secular shift from
growth-promoting investment in infrastructure to spending on politically motivated pork-barrel
projects, successful citizen mobilization in response to environmental disasters, and demographic
shifts that led to population decline). His main conclusions are that although mega-conurbations
are correctly understood as self-organizing systems, they are still always structured by governance
institutions at both macro and micro scales, and that rapid urbanization was transformative not
only of urban space, but also of governance institutions themselves. Finally, he argues that the
Japanese case suggests that as urban transitions are increasingly rapid and take place under
place and time-specific conditions, the particular timing and contingent choices in each case
will have profound long-term consequences for the urbanism and urban society achieved, because
enduring patterns are created during urbanization and processes of change are likely to slow as
rates of growth decrease. This suggests an urgency to better understanding these processes and
their consequences, and of the potential for planning to contribute to avoiding the worst outcomes,
and fostering positive aspects.
Labbé’s (2019) contribution is grounded in her ongoing fieldwork studying the urbanization of
Hanoi and the surrounding Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam. This paper resonates
strongly with many of the issues discussed in part one above, but also poses an important challenge
to this conceptual framework. As Labbé shows, the metropolitan region centred on Hanoi
 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING STUDIES 9

demonstrates many of the characteristics of mega-conurbations we describe, including very high

densities, rapid periurban growth that includes both in situ urbanization of rural settlements and
large scale land development by business-state coalitions facilitated by the state’s expropriation
powers, and is characterized by major disjunctures between formal planning and governance frame-
works and actual land development practices, among others. She argues that the planning systems
and plans inherited from the socialist era have become ineffective and even ‘chimerical’ since market
reforms, and allow competing actors and regimes outside the state to dominate the production of the
built environment (with the active collusion of state actors). As she concisely puts it
state-business coalitions appropriate and commoditise large tracts of land around the delta’s urban centres,
generating windfall profits from the capture of the rent gap between agricultural land (whose value is main-
tained at artificially low levels by the state) and urban land (whose value is determined by market mechanisms).

The challenge for our mega-conurbation hypothesis is that even though the Red River Delta region
does have a population of over 20 million, and is seeing rapid periurbanisation, it has only two rela-
tively small core cities, and the planning challenge here is only partly associated with scale and speed
of urbanization, and seems much more strongly linked to the transition from socialist planning to
markets. This suggests the possibility that these challenges are widespread, and not particularly
associated with new scales of mega-conurbation.
Harms (2019) examines processes of urbanization of the region centred on Ho Chi Minh City in
southern Vietnam. He argues that while HCMC is not a mega-conurbation but a fast-growing pri-
mate city, the idea of large-scale polycentric growth has been exploited by property developers and
has encouraged the emergence of a pro-growth real estate regulatory regime designed primarily to
facilitate profitable land development and the growth of revenues for the state budget. He suggests
that while the plan to create a multi-centred structure was initially sold as a means to develop sur-
rounding peripheries and reduce pressure on central Ho Chi Minh City, it has served primarily to
legitimate large-scale development projects financed by powerful real estate companies with political
connections and access to international finance. And regulatory authority has been ceded to para-
statal management authorities administrated by high-level politicians that, in order to attract invest-
ment, have been designed to create ‘one-stop’ approval processes, effectively granting development
control almost entirely to powerful actors. As he puts it, ‘powerful interests … coopt the idea of a
megalopolis to leverage their own position in a competitive landscape of land speculation.’ Processes
and projects of urbanization are in this way captured by those with sufficient power, capital and
hubris to seize the initiative, whom he describes as ‘visionary mastermind megalomaniacs.’ This
paper supports the analysis of governance challenges outlined in part one, but as with Labbé’s
paper, suggests that these may be widespread phenomena in large, fast-growing urban areas in
the global south, not conditions seen only in mega-conurbations.
This analysis is supported by Shatkin (2019), who argues that a political economy approach
focused on speculative urban real estate development and the state infrastructure investments
designed to facilitate it allows him to sidestep the varied complexities of mega-conurbation growth,
and focus on the core governance and political processes involved in mega-conurbanization. In his
perspective, the focus of analysis must be on the ways in which state actors attempt to reform and
deploy laws and property institutions to enable capital investment in land, and to shape urbanization
processes in their own interests. Shatkin suggests that there are two key ‘optics’ shaping state and
corporate actors’ understanding of mega-conurbation growth. First is the land-infrastructure-econ-
omic development-finance nexus in which state infrastructure building facilitates urban land and
property investment, and second is the ‘rent-gap’ through which extraordinary profits can be rea-
lized by private actors from the development or redevelopment of land in processes of urban growth.
Both optics inspire state and corporate actors to see urban growth as presenting major opportunities,
and have inspired increasingly ambitious development schemes. At the same time, state and corpor-
ate actors are linked by similar motivations and spatial strategies, and we see a convergence of inter-
ests of state and private actors. He asks: ‘How are speculative financial capital, and globally
10 J. FRIEDMANN AND A. SORENSEN

circulating models of financialization and privatization, influencing the strategies of both state and
corporate actors?’ Reviewing cases in Manila, Jakarta, and in China, he argues that while such
approaches are increasingly widespread, differing institutional, political, and sociospatial contexts
have resulted in different levels of success in each place. He concludes that a focus on these strategies
yields important insights into current political struggles over land, governance, and urban growth.
Björkman and Venkataramani (2019) pose a quite different but equally profound challenge to the
conceptual framework presented in part one, by forcing us to question our assumptions about what
is included ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the boundaries of any given mega-conurbation, and how conurba-
tions are tied together in what Friedmann (2019) describes as a ‘fusing of urban horizons’. They pre-
sent rich ethnographic studies of two territories that are differently linked to Mumbai. One is the
small city of Nagaur in western Rajasthan, situated about 1100 km from Mumbai yet which has cru-
cial economic and social linkages with Mumbai, as many Nagoris live much of their lives in Mumbai
as milk traders and merchants where they own and operate tea-houses, sweets shops, and dairies.
The other is the Mobaikar community, which while well within Mumbai’s city limits is a fishing
community that has fought to retain its official status as ‘non-urban’ because this status supports
their claims to rights to land, housing, and infrastructure. These two cases point to the multiple
and contradictory ways that territories become part of, or excluded from, the fabric of the city in
ways that have little to do with spatial proximity. As they put it, these
accounts reveal how concepts and categories borne of planning practices are themselves constitutive of the
sociomaterial contradictions that linkage practices mediate - practices that attempt to know/represent the
city “as a whole” would seek to resolve. The paper thus makes a case for conceptualizing (and engaging)
city planners, surveyors and engineers not as experts who “intervene” or act upon cities as planning objects,
but rather as mediators in a world of mediators: socially situated actors working within the complexities and
contradictions of always-already mediated urban processes.

The intent at the start of this project was to provoke careful consideration of the implications of
and challenges posed by the dramatically increasing scale and speed of development of mega-con-
urbations in Asia. We hope that others will be inspired by these papers to consider the conceptual
and practical challenges posed by these emerging forms and scales of urbanization.

Note
1. Reasons for failure to act on diseconomies include lack of relevant information, insufficient understanding of
observed trends, large margins of error in existing statistical information, long delays between an occurrence
and its capture by the relevant information system, fragmentation of governmental units, government secrecy,
financial constraints, corruption, censorship, disbelief in accuracy of information, short time horizons, inap-
propriate incentive structures, lack of a sense of urgency, countervailing arguments, a lack of analytical capacity,
etc. Many of these are seen in contemporary failures to act to prevent climate change, which promises to be
extraordinarily costly in multiple dimensions in the medium term.

Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful for the support and encouragement of Leonie Sandercock, who has graciously allowed me to
include John Friedmann’s paper in this special issue, and his contributions to this introduction. I also wish to acknowl-
edge the financial and logistical support of the University of Toronto Asian Institute, the Department of Geography
and Planning, and the Dean of the University of Toronto Scarborough for our 2016 workshop. This project could not
have happened without the engagement, ideas, and support of all those involved in this special issue, and particularly
John’s inspiring contributions, but I alone am responsible for any remaining errors and omissions, André Sorensen,
November 2018.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING STUDIES 11

Funding
This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2016-
1234].

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