Gavin W. Jones: demography detective and the mystery of the MURs

Abstract

Meeting for the first time in Jakarta in the early 1980s, Gavin Jones and I encountered a great mystery: how had decades of slow-growing, involuting cities in Asia suddenly become a new era of accelerated urbanisation producing mega-urban regions (MURs) with population sizes having no historical precedent? With collaborators in 6 MURs, in 2000 we launched a book project presenting our solution to the mystery. We showed how MUR formations extended far beyond core cities by incorporating towns and villages into their daily orbits. Our findings illuminate key issues at stake, including increasing disparities in life chances over space, rising risks of global climate change, and complexities of MUR governance.

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