Percetptions of Area. Administrators were asked if they considered their city's area to be too Iarge, largc, just right, small, or too small. Overall 41 percent considered the city to be small or too small. The Philippines (77%) and Korea (65%) were the most concerned about the restricted area. India (25%) and Pakistan (22%) found this to be less a problem. At the other end, only 20 percent of all admimistrators thought their cities were too large or just large. Pakistani and Indian admimistrators held this view twice as much as did others.

Desire to Expand Urban Area. On the other hand, When we asked if the city area should be expanded, fully two-thirds thought it should be. All of those who considered their cities to be too smal1 wanted it to expand, and 91 percent of those who thought it to be just small wanted expansion, as can be seen in table 8. But about half of all others, even those who considered the city to be too large, wanted expansion. The major reasons had to do with better capacities for planming and greater revenue bases. Moreover, this desire to expand is sttong in every cotmtry. There were 11 "don't know" or no responses from the 29 Japanese admimistrators. Of the remaining 18, 10 wished to see their city area expand. The weakest desire for expansion was found in Pakistan, Where four of the nine administrators wish to expand, four did not wish to expand, and one gave no reply. In all other countries a clear majority of the admimistrators wished to see the area expand, even if they felt the city to be too large already.

Table 8
Reported Desire to Expand the City Area
by Perception of City size
[with Total and Inhabited Area in Square Kilometers
for 14 Chinese Cities Shown in Parentheses]

This reflects a condition the Asian Urban Information Center of Kobe has found since it began its first urban studies, even before the Center was officially founded. Cities need to expand their aerial coverage in order to do a better job of urban planning.

Whether they need to expand to the level of Chinese cities, including vast tracts of rural land, is another question that deserves to be considered. We can begin to address this question by looking more closcly at the Chinese cities. For each Chinese city in each cell of table 8, we also show the reported totaI area and inhabited area where they are given for the Chinese cities.
What is curious here is the lack of any relationship between obiective measures and perceptlons of city size for the 14 Chinese cities, Which have undergone Iarge scale aerial expansion over the past few decades. Neither the total area, nor the ratio of total to inhabited area is related to the perception of size or the desire to expand the area. Cities ranging from 30 to 14 square kilometers of inhabited area are considered large, but the range for being considered small or tco small is from 6.6 to 182 square kilometers of inhabited area. Similarly overlapplng ranges are found using the total area. There are two possible explanations. Either the reported total or inhabited area is inaccurate, or other unreported conditions are operating, supporting the first is the fact that Shanghai reports its total area as 6,100 sqtnre kilometers and its inhabited area as only six square kilometers. The lalter is Clearly in error. It is qute possible that other conditions not being measured in this survey are at work determlnlng how admimistrators view both the size of their cities, and the desire to expand its area.