Urban-Rural Systems in Asia: A Research Agenda

Abstract

These brief notes outline a research agenda for hybrid urban-rural regions in Asia. It emerges from work being undertaken by the Urban-Rural Systems team at the ETH Zürich’s Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. All cities have their hinterlands of one kind or another. We are interested in the hinterlands of cities surrounded by tropical, wet-rice agriculture. Such hinterlands are typical of many parts of Asia, and they have very specific ecological, economic and demographic characteristics, which mean they interact with nearby urban centres in distinctive ways. Most notably, wet-rice agriculture supports relatively high population densities with fine-grained plot patterns. When urbanisation processes interact with such areas, the rural does not immediately give way to the urban and instead a hybrid rural-urban typology emerges. Sometimes dubbed desakota landscapes (Indonesian for ‘village’ and ‘city’), they are neither strictly urban nor rural in character, but a mixture of both.