ABSTRACT
The urban form of cities in Southeast Asia has been associated with terms such as “messy urbanism,” “emergent urbanism,” “incremental urbanism,” “mega urban region” and “megacity” (Chalana and Hou 2016; Dovey 2014; McGee and Robinson 1995; Rao 2012; Roy 2005). Such depictions stem from scholars who observed urban expansion in the Global South as a complex interface between the city and the country. In contrast to “suburbanization,” which suggests a more or less unidirectional “urban sprawl” phenomenon due to the expansion of serviced land, the urban transition in Southeast Asia is taking the shape of “peri-urbanization,” a hybrid space known for instance as desakota (from the Indonesian words desa for village and kota for town) (Friedmann 2011; Leaf 2011; McGee 1991). Coined by Terry McGee (1991: 7), the term described “a last zone of urbanization, where non-agricultural activity is increasingly mixed with agriculture.” Such zones are “significant foci of industrialization and rapid economic growth” which clusters “around the large urban cores of many Asian countries.”
