A. Enquiry Aims and Procedures

The Asian Urban Administrators' Enquiry is designed to obtain from urban administrators themselves information on the conditions that they perceive to be major problems or major advantages in their cities. It also asks administrators what specific projects they have underway to address the problems they consider most important. This will provide the opportunity in the future to follow some of the projects to learn how they are working. All of this information is ultimately to be distributed back to the administrators themselves so that they can become better acquainted with the problems faced by their counterparts in other cities, and the projects being developed to address those problems.

The Enquiry was carried out through mailed, self-administered questionnaires distributed through select officials, acting as access persons in each country. For large countries the Enquiry focuses on cities of 100,000 population or more. For the smaller countries, where this cut-off point would eliminate most cities, the Enquiry is directed to all state or provincial capitals.

The questionnaires to Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, and Japan were translated into local languages respectively. Questionnaires were sent to India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, The Philippines, and Thailand in April 1989. In September 1989 additional questionnaires were sent to Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Also the questionnaires were sent to Japan in January 1990.

The actual process of collecting the data differed from country to country, as data collection was adapted to local conditions. In Japan, the Kobe office of the Asian Urban Information Center sent Japanese versions of the questionnaire, which was fairly changed under the Japanese actual conditions to colleagues in 47 cities, with covering letter from the Mayor of Kobe. In India, the access person obtained clearance and endorsement from the Ministry of Urban Development, which also helped select the 55 cities to be included. Questionnaires with covering letters endorsing and requesting assistance were sent out, and two rounds of follow-up letters were sent. Despite the intense effort, only 15 replies were received. In Korea, the access person and his assistants had the questionnaire translated and sent to administrators of 38 cities. These were followed by personal visits in many cases to ensure a high rate of return from 31 cities. In Thailand, the access person sent 6 questionnaires and received 4 replies. In Nepal, the access person completed all questionnaires himself, from his personal knowledge of the cities selected. As we shall see later, this produced some apparent bias in the responses from Nepal. In Indonesia the questionnaire was sent to about 50 cities, and were completed by 30 local committees, usually of the local economic planning agency. The access person in the Philippines sent questionnaires out to urban administrators of 20 cities and received 12 responses from them. The access person in Malaysia used the mails to distribute 15 questionnaires to the capital city of each state. Follow-up letters still produced only five replies. As of December 1990, only one reply had been received from Bangladesh, but that one is not included in this report. Responses have not been received from Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Overall the procedure worked fairly well, at least for this pilot project. It was also relatively easy to locate and gain the cooperation of a local access person. It is obvious, however, that this procedure risks achieving only a small return rate, even with rather intense follow-up efforts. For some countries more direct and personal efforts may be needed.

The present report is based on returns from 128 cities in eight countries. The distribution is shown in Table 1.

Table 1.
Number of Replies

This report first describes the size and both the magnitude and source of city growth. It then examines administrators' perceptions of that growth, followed by an examination of their assessment of various urban conditions, asking whether those conditions represent major problems for the city, or if they constitute an advantage. Finally, the report examines the types of projects urban administrators are developing to address their problems.

A major problem with this type of enquiry lies in the possible influence of the position of the respondent on the pattern of responses. Our instructions requested the survey instrument to be completed by the Mayor or Chief Administrator in each city. For the 102 cities outside of Japan, the respondent is dearly identified as the Mayor or Chief Administrative Office in 80 cases. In the case of Indonesia, however, the questionnaire was completed by a committee headed by the Director of the Local Planning Agency. In the other cases, the respondent was primarily the Chief Engineer or Director of Public Works. For the Japanese cities, the respondent was in all but 3 cases the Director of the City Planning and Management Department. In effect, we have a high degree of uniformity in the formal positions of the respondents, though, of course, we have no systematic information of the specific characteristics or of the information sources in those offices. Nor can we know the impact of the committee respondent in Indonesia against the individual responses in other cities.

There will remain questions about the validity and reliability of the responses. Problem scores represent individual judgements, and at this time we can know little of the conditions that affect those judgements. We can, however, examine both the validity and reliability of certain responses. Where we have objective indicators published by the government, we can examine the relationship between those objective indicators and the administrators' scores on urban problems. We have done this for Korea and Japan, and find a fairly close correspondence between the sets of available measures, which gives us some confidence in the administrators' assessments of problems. To address the issue of reliability we use responses to different questions that cover the same condition. For example, the instrument asks about population figures for 1960, 1970 and 1980. From these we can calculate total rates of increase and match these against administrators' perceptions of the rate of growth, which are derived from other questions. Appendix I undertakes this type of internal analysis to determine how reliable are the administrators' perceptions of problems.