How Tokyo, Jakarta and Asia's other megacities can learn from each other
19.05.2026 13:38:54
In November 2025, the United Nations released an updated World Urbanization Prospects report. The new data officially ended Tokyo’s long reign as the world’s most populous city: Jakarta took first place with a population of 42 million, followed by Dhaka (37 million), while Japan’s capital — or more precisely, the Greater Tokyo agglomeration — dropped to third place with 33 million residents, writes Benjamin Bansal in his article for Nikkei Asia.
A few months earlier, in June, New Zealand geographer Terry McGee passed away at the age of 89. He was one of the leading theorists of Asian urbanization. It was McGee who formulated the idea that the city is “not a place, but a process.” His concept of desakota (from the Indonesian words desa — village and kota — city) describes how elements of rice-farming rural landscapes are preserved and intertwined with the urban environment.
The change in leadership in the ranking of megacities confirms McGee’s ideas and deserves closer attention. At its core is a change in the UN’s calculation methodology. Geospatial data is now used, allowing the identification of functional urban zones beyond formal administrative boundaries and imperfect population censuses.
Looking at the 2025 megacities — agglomerations with populations exceeding 10 million — it becomes clear that many cities fit perfectly into the rice-farming desakota model. Jakarta, Dhaka, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, and Manila are located in fertile river deltas, where the intermingling of village and city remains the key spatial logic.
The rapid growth of these agglomerations in recent decades has confronted them with unique challenges of scale and governance. Here, it is more useful for them to learn from each other than to mechanically adopt “best practices” developed for entirely different urban histories.
Beyond Southeast Asia, there are cities that once matched McGee’s model but over time formalized their infrastructure, partially concealing — though not erasing — their “village” roots. These include Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Seoul.
Let’s focus on Tokyo. It is often portrayed as a mosaic of villages — an image reinforced by the “small town” atmosphere in typical neighborhoods. However, postwar urbanization followed the logic of desakota: development spread across former agricultural lands, following old roads and paths, forming a low-rise, dense, and irregular plot structure.
“Convenience” stores, public baths (sentō), small workshops, and production facilities reproduced with remarkable regularity. Land readjustment mechanisms — consolidation of plots for infrastructure and public needs, followed by the return of reorganized plots to owners — especially around stations and within neighborhoods, created space for public facilities. As the economy grew, residents modernized their homes without demolishing them, while the state gradually added roads and utilities to the districts.
As a result, daily life in Tokyo retained a pedestrian scale at the neighborhood level, even as the city became one of the world leaders in railway and engineering infrastructure. These “emergent” districts became the foundation of the megacity’s success. Today, however, they are under threat: a wave of redevelopment increasingly destroys their fragile spatial logic.
Although the Indonesian capital is often viewed through the lens of high-rise business corridors, the vast majority of residents live in kampungs — dense, low-rise neighborhoods. They are vulnerable to flooding, suffer from infrastructure shortages and insecure property rights, yet their spatial logic has proven remarkably resilient.
These are not “anti-modern” relics, but essentially the same form of emergent urbanization that once drove Tokyo’s growth. In narrow alleys, housing and small trade coexist, and residents self-organize to solve common problems.
Today, kampungs are at a crossroads. In its rush to meet “hard” infrastructure needs — flood protection and mass transit development — the city risks erasing this informal structure.
It is here that the dialogue between Tokyo and Jakarta becomes truly mutual. The history of Japan’s capital, with its “in-place” modernization and land readjustment mechanisms, shows how kampungs can be integrated into the urban fabric without destruction. At the same time, Jakarta’s experience clearly demonstrates what Tokyo may lose if redevelopment continues to accelerate.
To those who claim that a 42-million-strong Jakarta is unmanageable without strict “best practices” and strengthened institutions, Tokyo’s history provides a powerful counterargument. The postwar surge of Japan’s capital was achieved not through perfect vertical power, but through a productive balance between the central government, the metropolitan government, and municipal districts. This balance helped avoid the major failures of total master planning and “slum clearances” typical of Europe and the United States at the time.
Even beyond the rice-farming desakota, other Asian megacities can benefit from such horizontal exchange of experience. The more arid cities of South Asia are in many ways similar to the delta agglomerations: they also grew “in place,” blurring the line between village and city.
Of the approximately 600 million people living in the world’s megacities today, about 70% are in Asia. It is time to recognize its distinct type of urbanism as the new norm. The 2025 UN rankings symbolize the end of the era when Asian urbanization was explained solely through Western models.
Whether it is Tokyo’s postwar neighborhoods or Jakarta’s kampungs, Asian cities show that modernization does not necessarily mean “starting from scratch.” As Terry McGee argued, the city is a process. In Asia, it has most often been successful when it built upon the existing social and spatial fabric rather than sweeping it away.
For politicians, urban planners, and investors, this means the need for strategies that work with existing neighborhoods, not against them.
Translation by Maxim Krylov
Illustration: “Eurasia Today”, Midjourney
A few months earlier, in June, New Zealand geographer Terry McGee passed away at the age of 89. He was one of the leading theorists of Asian urbanization. It was McGee who formulated the idea that the city is “not a place, but a process.” His concept of desakota (from the Indonesian words desa — village and kota — city) describes how elements of rice-farming rural landscapes are preserved and intertwined with the urban environment.
The change in leadership in the ranking of megacities confirms McGee’s ideas and deserves closer attention. At its core is a change in the UN’s calculation methodology. Geospatial data is now used, allowing the identification of functional urban zones beyond formal administrative boundaries and imperfect population censuses.
Looking at the 2025 megacities — agglomerations with populations exceeding 10 million — it becomes clear that many cities fit perfectly into the rice-farming desakota model. Jakarta, Dhaka, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, and Manila are located in fertile river deltas, where the intermingling of village and city remains the key spatial logic.
The rapid growth of these agglomerations in recent decades has confronted them with unique challenges of scale and governance. Here, it is more useful for them to learn from each other than to mechanically adopt “best practices” developed for entirely different urban histories.
Beyond Southeast Asia, there are cities that once matched McGee’s model but over time formalized their infrastructure, partially concealing — though not erasing — their “village” roots. These include Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Seoul.
Let’s focus on Tokyo. It is often portrayed as a mosaic of villages — an image reinforced by the “small town” atmosphere in typical neighborhoods. However, postwar urbanization followed the logic of desakota: development spread across former agricultural lands, following old roads and paths, forming a low-rise, dense, and irregular plot structure.
“Convenience” stores, public baths (sentō), small workshops, and production facilities reproduced with remarkable regularity. Land readjustment mechanisms — consolidation of plots for infrastructure and public needs, followed by the return of reorganized plots to owners — especially around stations and within neighborhoods, created space for public facilities. As the economy grew, residents modernized their homes without demolishing them, while the state gradually added roads and utilities to the districts.
As a result, daily life in Tokyo retained a pedestrian scale at the neighborhood level, even as the city became one of the world leaders in railway and engineering infrastructure. These “emergent” districts became the foundation of the megacity’s success. Today, however, they are under threat: a wave of redevelopment increasingly destroys their fragile spatial logic.
Jakarta, which has become the world’s largest functional urban zone, faces a similar tension between the daily life of its neighborhoods and large-scale infrastructure projects — the same conflict that once defined Tokyo’s development.
Although the Indonesian capital is often viewed through the lens of high-rise business corridors, the vast majority of residents live in kampungs — dense, low-rise neighborhoods. They are vulnerable to flooding, suffer from infrastructure shortages and insecure property rights, yet their spatial logic has proven remarkably resilient.
These are not “anti-modern” relics, but essentially the same form of emergent urbanization that once drove Tokyo’s growth. In narrow alleys, housing and small trade coexist, and residents self-organize to solve common problems.
Today, kampungs are at a crossroads. In its rush to meet “hard” infrastructure needs — flood protection and mass transit development — the city risks erasing this informal structure.
It is here that the dialogue between Tokyo and Jakarta becomes truly mutual. The history of Japan’s capital, with its “in-place” modernization and land readjustment mechanisms, shows how kampungs can be integrated into the urban fabric without destruction. At the same time, Jakarta’s experience clearly demonstrates what Tokyo may lose if redevelopment continues to accelerate.
To those who claim that a 42-million-strong Jakarta is unmanageable without strict “best practices” and strengthened institutions, Tokyo’s history provides a powerful counterargument. The postwar surge of Japan’s capital was achieved not through perfect vertical power, but through a productive balance between the central government, the metropolitan government, and municipal districts. This balance helped avoid the major failures of total master planning and “slum clearances” typical of Europe and the United States at the time.
Viewing Asian megacities as equals, rather than as “developed” and “developing” cases, requires a rethinking of urban theory itself — understanding these cities as variations of a single historical trajectory.
Even beyond the rice-farming desakota, other Asian megacities can benefit from such horizontal exchange of experience. The more arid cities of South Asia are in many ways similar to the delta agglomerations: they also grew “in place,” blurring the line between village and city.
Of the approximately 600 million people living in the world’s megacities today, about 70% are in Asia. It is time to recognize its distinct type of urbanism as the new norm. The 2025 UN rankings symbolize the end of the era when Asian urbanization was explained solely through Western models.
Whether it is Tokyo’s postwar neighborhoods or Jakarta’s kampungs, Asian cities show that modernization does not necessarily mean “starting from scratch.” As Terry McGee argued, the city is a process. In Asia, it has most often been successful when it built upon the existing social and spatial fabric rather than sweeping it away.
For politicians, urban planners, and investors, this means the need for strategies that work with existing neighborhoods, not against them.
Translation by Maxim Krylov
Illustration: “Eurasia Today”, Midjourney
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