Southeast Asia: Transition among the Nagas - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 401

of 30 million in 1901, stands as an example. At the other
end of the spectrum were vast insular and mainland areas
sparsely settled by shifting cultivators. Around 1900, ir-
rigated rice began diffusing, and several areas such as the
remaining frontiers of Java, lower Burma, central Siam
(Thailand), and the Mekong Delta transitioned from low
to high population densities. The first three decades of
the twentieth century continued this pattern of opening
up the region to export industries and tightening the
links between the colonies and the imperial powers
overseas.
The end of the Japanese interregnum in 1945 ush-
ered in a period of transition to independence. During
this time, international trade withered, urban and indus-
trial employment fell, and many were forced to revert to
a subsistence existence. Nevertheless, there were factors
of continuity as well as those of change.
The transition to national independence increased
population mobility , only part of which was rural to ur-
ban migration. Many moved from overcrowded rural ar-
eas to less crowded ones. Others moved to cities as
squatters, and still others populated the first suburban
and even exurban areas outside large cities.
Out-migration of Western colonial administrators
and business people—along with ethnic Chinese from
several areas, and all Indians from Burma, plus
Vietnamese from Cambodia—were other significant
movements. Plantation and commercial rice regions were
the areas mainly affected by these out-migrations. Many
foreign managers and overseers were replaced by
indigenous people.

Many of these increases are related to processes of
the transactional revolution, whereby flows of people,
commodities, capital, and information are no longer
hampered by the limits of space. While cities continue to
grow , they do so over larger areas. This is called region-
based urbanization, and it produces extended metropol-
itan regions (EMRs).
It is in the areas adjacent to currently defined urban
areas that urbanization is occurring most rapidly , and
this is reflected in the growing proportion of populations
engaged in nonagricultural activities (refer to kotadesasi
settlements in Chapter 4). EMRs have two main compo-
nents: the central city and the metropolitan region
containing adjacent urban settlements. With the excep-
tion of Singapore, it is these outer rings that are experi-
encing the most rapid growth. Meanwhile, city cores
have maintained substantial shares of metropolitan pop-
ulations. In fact, city populations continue to grow with
increasing density and congestion (Figure 14-14). EMRs
also continue to attract rural-urban migrants. At the so-
cial level these areas are extraordinarily heterogeneous
with multiple types of land use existing side by side. Y ou
will learn more about these trends and individual cities
in the next two chapters.

NEW RURAL DYNAMICS
There have always been market dependencies and inter-
actions between rural and urban worlds, but the rural
world of today is different in many ways. While village
may describe life for the majority of Southeast Asians,
millions now spend some of their time in urban areas
both living and working and millions more spend time
working in urban-type activities that have come to the
countryside.
There is an assumption that people who live in vil-
lages are farmers (i.e., that “rural” is synonymous with
“agriculture”). But this is not necessarily the case. Urban
residents from rural areas often still identify themselves
as villagers and farmers. In other words, domicile does
not always mean “home” and rural and urban are fre-
quently melded.
Recent studies of village economies consistently in-
dicate that between 30 and 50 percent of total household
income is derived from non-farm or off-farm sources.
Many households have different family members partici-
pating in either rural or urban livelihoods, making it
problematic to classify the household as rural or urban.
The transport revolution has been instrumental in
expanding networks of contact and communication. The

METROPOLITAN EXPANSION
In Southeast Asia, it is the largest metropolitan areas that
are growing much faster than other cities. For example,
Kuala Lumpur has grown at almost double the rate of
Singapore in the post-war period, reflecting its position
as the capital of the new state of Malaysia. Once French
Indochina split into Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Ph-
nom Penh grew rapidly in contrast to the former In-
dochina capital of Hanoi. Primate cities such as Bangkok,
Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City
(Saigon) continue to dominate the urban hierarchy .
Urbanization in general is on the increase. For
example, the proportion of Indonesians living in urban
areas of more than one million rose from 32.6 percent in
1971 to 43 percent in 2009. In the Philippines, the
Manila Metropolitan Region has expanded from 1.5 mil-
lion in 1950 to more than 11.5 million in 2010.