Asian urbanisation

Urbanisation is progressing in Asia at breakneck speed, producing almost overnight city-regions sprawling vast distances into the peri-urban countryside. As they grow, in unplanned ways, so the problems deepen. The provision of all manner of infrastructure lags increasingly behind with consequent problems of traffic gridlock, seriously inadequate sanitation and, in coastal cities, increasing flooding where the impact of climate change threatens to render whole urban neighbourhoods unliveable. Meanwhile super-rich minorities are emerging where, nevertheless, poverty is—temporarily—kept at bay and a vast mass of new middle classes are attempting to live the modern consumer life amidst rampant corruption that expresses itself particularly in massive oversupply of upper income housing that few can afford with whole developments remaining permanently vacant. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is a typical case where currently a kind of euphoria is palpable where much of the population feel they have arrived in the modern consumer world. Whilst officialdom projects growth in all dimensions to be continuing into even the more distant future, one may be sceptical that this can, in reality, continue for much longer.