Household energy use and environment in Asian cities: an introduction.

In the poorer countries of the world, where energy consumption per capita is lower than in the industrialized nations, the process of rapid urbanization is a strong feature of the dynamic of economic development. Population growth rates in cities are consistently higher than in the countryside, due both to higher natural increases and to net migration. Although the majority ·of Asia's population is still rural, this dominance is expected to shift sometime around the tum of the century. Already, developing countries in Asia have at least 16 cities with populations exceeding five million persons. And the development of megalopolises, which link several large cities in a closely related urban region, is emerging as a typical evolutionary pattern (e.g., in Western Java or Taiwan). Cities are the focal points of economic activity, accounting for the bulk of regional GDP and growth. They have active and often efficient markets, providing diversity of choice, one of the main attractions of urban life. As Asian economies grow, driven primarily by the transactions and production of the region's cities, this trend is only likely to be reinforced. Urban lifestyles are readily adopted as the way of the future. At the same time, cities are characterized by sharp disparities in income, living conditions, and access to basic services, between those social groups that have managed to capture the economic benefits of rapid growth, and those that have not.