Double Book Review Two Perspectives on Five Cities: Modelling Asian Urban Population-Environment Dynamics, edited by Gayl Ness with Michael Low. Oxford University Press, 2000, 309 pp. RICHARD P. CINCOTTA Population Action International Perhaps because mega-cities (defined by some demographers as an urban agglomeration of more than 10 million people)—such as Tokyo, Delhi, Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Cairo—seem perpetually immersed in crises of deteriorating air quality, water quality, dwindling water supplies and the public health problems these create, they grab the attention of the press and a good many social researchers. According to the UN, however, only 4.3% of humanity lives in mega-cities. Scarcely any attention goes to the hundreds of mid-sized cities, where most urbanites live and where the UN suggests the majority of the 21st century’s urban growth is likely to occur. Clearly, this is where sound planning and management are most likely to pay off in the long term. And fortunately, this is what Five Cities, edited by Gayl Ness with Michael Low, is all about. The book is the culmination of 10 years of cooperative research efforts focused on medium sized cities, sponsored through the University of Michigan’s Population and Environment Dynamics Program and the Asian Urban Information Center. Five Cities scores high on organization and methodology. The book has three sections: the first presents an introduction to urban population and environmental trends; the second part comprises five case studies, each from a medium-sized city—Cebu City in the Philippines, Pusan in Korea, Khon Kaen in Thailand, Kobe in Japan, and Faisalabad in Pakistan. The third section is a policy-oriented summary. I most enjoyed reading the case

Send correspondence to Richard P. Cincotta, Senior Research Associate, Population Action International, 1300 19th St., NW, 2nd Floor, Washington, DC 20036; cincotta@ popact.org. Population and Environment, Vol. 23, No. 1, September 2001  2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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studies, and I found part three effective in communicating the authors’ findings and recommendations. To their credit, the editors have organized five research teams to conduct generally comparable studies of medium-sized Asian cities. All have written using a similar organizational framework. All but one (Cebu City) use STELLA, a model-building application that runs on a desktop computer, as the basis for projecting urban variables, such as numbers of vehicles, students enrolled, and aspects of water and air quality. And case-study teams are composed primarily of resident scholars—another admirable feature of this book and the research effort it represents. The city case studies contain some wonderful anecdotes, and a number of interesting lessons emerge from the authors’ research and modelling experiences. For example, authors of the Khon Kaen case study (my favorite) found that they could not use UN age-structure data to adequately model school enrollments. The student numbers calculated were just a third to a quarter of the actual registered enrollment. It turns out that parents in the surrounding countryside board their children with urban relatives to take advantage of better schooling within the Khon Kaen city limits. Of course, there are other interesting lessons; like Khon Kaen, each city case study exposes some unique historical, environmental or social feature that makes generalizing urban development a tough task. I was much less impressed with this book’s graphics. As the editors explain, getting Five Cities into the hands of Asian policymakers required serious cost-cutting. The figures and tables are stark and without captions and keys, requiring readers to sometimes search the text to interpret what they report and what abbreviations on the figures mean. Despite this drawback, Five Cities succeeds as a handbook for urban managers and planners who would like to project trends and future needs, but have more enthusiasm than they have data and financial resources. The case studies are templates that use simple, transparent computer models to generate a range of meaningful scenarios. However, this is not the book one turns to for sophisticated modelling methods (nor is that its intent). And if you are looking to understand the current social and environmental debates on world urbanization, I would suggest two other recent publications: one by demographer Martin Brockerhoff, An Urbanizing World (Population Reference Bureau, Washington, DC, 2000); the other from the Comparative Urban Studies Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, entitled Urbanization, Population, Environment, and Security (edited by C. Rosan, B. A. Ruble, J. S. Tulchin, 2000). One last point. Five Cities could be further developed into a course on basic urban demography and development, particularly if it were supple-

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mented with STELLA (the model-building computer application used), an appendix providing examples of equations used and a short discussion of important modelling issues, and an email-powered discussion group that attached students to some of the Asian authors. I hope the editors will consider that possibility. DANIEL R. VINING Population Studies Center This is a book about five secondary cities in Asia: Kobe (Japan), Pusan (Korea), Cebu City (the Philippines), Khon Kaen (Thailand), and Fasailabad (Pakistan). Notice that these cities are not well known; they are not the capital cities. If there is anything different countries agree on, it is that too many people reside in their biggest cities (generally, but not always, the capital) and that a redistribution needs to occur from the biggest city to some smaller ones. They don’t agree on fertility policies (Singapore, for example, has a pro-natalist policy, as does France), but all countries seem to agree that their primate cities are too populated and that more people ought to live in the hinterlands. Countries may not agree on the size of their populations, but they do agree on their spatial distributions: they should be less concentrated in big “megacities,” like Karachi, Bangkok, Manila, Seoul, or Tokyo. Fasailabad is about 550 miles northeast of Karachi and has about 2 million people. Khon Kaen is about 150 miles from Bangkok, a small city of about 200,000 people, but important because it is the central place of the Northeast region, a major source of migrants to Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, and thus acts as a counterweight to this capital. Cebu City lies 300 miles southeast of Manila, also a small city of about 700,000 but belonging to a larger metropolitan area of 1.5 million, lying on a boundary between the Philippines’ Muslim south and its Christian center and north. Pusan is South Korea’s largest port, its second largest city behind Seoul, in its southeastern corner, a large city of about 4 million. Kobe is also a port, a city of 1.5 million, quite near Osaka, Japan’s second largest city, about 200 miles east of Tokyo. This book examines the physical/environmental aspects of these populations, which is novel in the urbanology literature, which usually focus on their socioeconomic aspects. Since most of the future human population

Send correspondence to Prof. Daniel R. Vining Jr., Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 130 McNeil Building, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104

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growth in the world will take place in urban areas, any student of population growth is, by definition, a student of cities. This study is basically of the sustainability of the development of these five cities. It concentrates on four environmental variables (land use, air, energy, and water) and three socioeconomic variables (transportation, social services, and the socialeconomic-political infrastructure). One fact that emerges is that the higher the population growth of the country to which a city belongs, the higher its population growth. Hence, Cebu City in the Philippines and Faisalabad in Pakistan that are under enormous pressure from population growth, whereas Khon Kaen in Northeast Thailand and Pusan in South Korea are not under such pressure because the fertility in their countries has been falling rapidly and is now under replacement. Kobe lies in Japan, which has had below replacement fertility for two decades and now has very low fertility. The lower fertility countries (Japan, South Korea, Thailand) also have high per-capita incomes, which tends to mitigate the adverse environmental effects of rapid urbanization. Five Cities is organized into three parts. The first part summarizes the history of population growth and urbanization of the world’s human population as well as the model that is to be employed to analyze the five cities. It doesn’t go into the actual mechanics (mathematics) of the model (it assumes an audience generally not “into” modeling per se but curious about what a model can do) but does describe in considerable detail how the model links the various variables together. The second part applies the model to the cities (except for Cebu City which lacks the data needed), and describes the results. The third part summarizes the findings and uses them to look into future. Everyone agrees the quality of life of a given city’s residents is to be maximized. As the authors say, this is a difficult thing to measure. However, they finally quantify it in terms of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR, defined as the average number of children a woman would have in a lifetime, given the birth rates of women in her population by age now; the number needed to replace her in the next generation generally being 2.1). On that a curious thing is said on page 59: “[W]e shall propose the highest quality of life comes from a TFR of 2.1 and that TFRs of higher or lower levels imply a lower quality of life.” Thus is the quality of life variable here quantified. Belief in the benign demographic transition permeates this book. The demographic transition is, indeed, a fundamental model in demography. Basically, it says that birth and death rates begin high, then death rates first fall to a low level while birth rates remain high leading to the familiar population explosion, then birth rates fall to an equal level with death rates and the population becomes stationary in size.

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Since this is basically an optimistic book, the authors expect the TFRs of various populations to fall to levels near 2.1, or stationarity. But this is not what we empirically observe. Birth rates do fall, but not to levels equal to death rates. What has happened so far is that certain areas of the world (Europe, East Asia, North America) have seen their TFRs fall well below 2.1, whereas other areas of the world (Africa, South and Central America, South and West Asia) have also seen their TFRs fall, but to levels considerably above 2.1. The result has been a kind of redistribution of population from the high fertility areas to the low fertility areas. If this pattern persists, then the cities of the low fertility areas will gradually fill up with immigrants from the high fertility areas, a point not noticed in this book. Indeed, the subject of international migration does not appear anywhere in Five Cities. And for that it must be faulted, for it is international migration that seems to be driving the system of cities that the authors wish to describe. Five Cities is not realistic about the direction we seem to be headed. This is not to say that it does not succeed on its own terms, but these are not the terms in which most readers of Population and Environment are concerned.