The author presents some of the wider debates on housing and development while focusing on the major Southeast Asian capital cities: Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Metro Manila. All these cities have expanded enormously in terms of population and size, all have enormous problems ranging from provision of clean water and sustainable housing for the poor to dealing with a constant inflow of rural-urban migrants. Despite this, most city governments remain worryingly ineffectual or uncommitted to solving urgent problems of their expanding cities.

This important book addresses issues of development and its environmental sustainability for the fastest growing areas in Asia — its cities. Recognizing sustainability with respect to the environment and its exploitation has yet to make its impact on development plans in Asia. The problem is due to the lack of cross-country studies, which provide a fair understanding of the different levels of development, as well as the wide variety of development strategies adopted by different countries. The relatively ineffective implementation of environmental assessment has not done much to reduce the damage to, or depletion of, the natural resource base.Sustainability and Cities: Concept and Assessment aims to bridge this gap by taking a sober look at the translation of concepts of environmental sustainability into terms that are meaningful and applicable for cities, particularly those in fast-developing countries like China.

Singapore housing has often been held up as a success story, especially the development of its public housing. This book aims to document the research and publication on this aspect of Singapore's development. Covering the periods prior to and after 1960, the annotated bibliography brings together in one volume both published and unpublished works.

This book reviews the politics and rationale of spatial planning, and the social processes involved in providing and shaping urban space-industrial, residential, retail, public space-in Singapore. Besides considering the meaning of urban space to the citizenry, future space implications and current international research concerns are highlighted.

The book focuses on the major challenges that world cities are facing in such key areas such as governance, social inclusiveness, infrastructural development, financial solvency as well as environmental and ecological sustainability. Based on case studies from cities in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific, top academics, professionals and policymakers from the world over presents their views on how to best strike the balance between growth and sutainability.

SINGAPORE: THE YEAR IN REVIEW 1998 is a collection of papers which were presented at the annual conference organized by the Institute of Policy Studies, a public policy think-tank in Singapore. Both the conference and this publication aim at a substantive discourse in the highlights of the events of the year just ended. This eighth volume offers more than a review of the year past, it holds substantive and erudite analyses as well as informed perspectives of what the future holds for the region.

In investigating the relationship between urbanization and sustainability in cities of developing countries, many researchers have looked to rising incomes as a driver for environmental improvement. This article challenges the transition and evolutionary models of urban environmental development that suggest that as cities grow in per capita income, their local environmental problems will diminish. The transition model is outcomes-based, and a competing model based on greater attention to participation in setting sustainability goals and assessing the progress toward those goals is presented. Consensus on appropriate sustainability indicators is a key element, albeit a challenging one, in the task of pursuing urban sustainability. This is due to the contested nature of the concept of sustainability and also the fact that much of the work done on sustainability has been conducted among countries or on a national scale. A brief review of health, urban transport, air quality, and sewerage indicators suggests that cities do not necessarily see more progress as the per capita income increases. Low-income cities in Southeast Asia that are performing well are likely to see a deterioration in standards with rapid economic and population growth.