The formation of slums need not be inevitable with rapid urbanization. Such an argument appears to be contradicted by evidence of large slum populations in a large number of developing countries and particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions like Asia. The evidence discussed suggests that city authorities faced with rapid urban development lack the capacity to cope with the diverse demands for infrastructural provision to meet economic and social needs. Not only are strategic planning and intervention major issues in agenda to manage rapid urbanization, but city governments are not effectively linking the economic development trajectory to implications for urban growth and, hence, housing needs. In the following discussion, a case study is presented in support of the argument that city governments have to first recognize and then act to establish the link that is crucial between economic development, urban growth, and housing. This is the agendum that has been largely neglected by city and national governments that have been narrowly focused on economic growth with the consequent proliferation of slum formation as a housing solution.

The way urbanization unfolds over the next few decades in the developing countries of Asia will have profound implications for sustainability. One of the more important opportunities is to guide urbanization along pathways that begin to uncouple these gains in well‐being from rising levels of energy use. Increasing energy use for transport, construction, climate control in houses and offices, and industrial processes is often accompanied by increasing levels of atmospheric emissions that impact human health, ecosystem functions, and the climate system. Agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry alter carbon stocks and fluxes as carbon dioxide, methane, and black carbon. In this article we explore how carbon management could be integrated into the development strategies of cities and urbanizing regions. In particular, we explore how changes in urban form, functions, and roles might alter the timing, aggregation, spatial distribution, and composition of carbon emissions. Our emphasis is on identifying system linkages and points of leverage. The study draws primarily on emission inventories and regional development histories carried out in the regions around the cities of Manila, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, New Delhi, and Chiang Mai. We find that how urban functions, such as mobility, shelter, and food, are provided has major implications for carbon emissions, and that each function is influenced by urban form and role in distinct ways. Our case studies highlight the need for major “U‐turns” in urban policy.

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This paper considers the role of, and hence the social and political significance that has been accorded to, the design and provision of public spaces in the urban planning process. This approach gives useful insights into understanding the role these spaces have played in the colonial and post-colonial city of Singapore. This discussion argues that public spaces in both the colonial and the post-colonial city are essentially constructions by the ruling élite and its planning regime and are thus politically charged. Popular involvement has been singularly lacking in the planning and development of public spaces in post-colonial Singapore. Instead, the general public has been marginalized in the creation of these spaces by the colonial and post-colonial state. The completeness of this exclusion is shown through the demise of most of the vital and liveliest, albeit previously appropriated, public spaces of the colonial city. Public housing and the re-invention of public spaces provided by a new social and political order followed the end of British colonial rule.In the following discussion, the role and significance of public spaces through the colonial period and then in the post-colonial developmental state are examined. It is shown that public space provision by government authorities has served initially more as an imposition of colonial ideals and social segregation, and latterly as a reification of the prevailing political ideology, than in meeting real public needs for such spaces. A major focus of this article is the use of public space as a political tool of control by the state over its denizens in the Foucauldian sense, and how this could be construed even through different systems of governance and political agendas in Singapore.

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