For this, the third round of the Asian Urban Inquiry, questionnaires were sent to approximately 300 cities in 9 countries. Responses were obtained from 187 of these cities. The number of responding cities by country is shown in Table II-1.

Table II-1
Number of Cities by Selected Country

1. Basic Data on City Size

City Size: Most of the cities in this inquiry are what is known as medium-sized or "second tier" cities. These terms generally refer to cities with populations of between 100,000 and 4,000,000 people. The area and population of these cities places them between the major urban areas and the rural areas of a given country.

a. Area: City area was reported in two categories, total area and inhabitable area, for three time periods: 1970, 1980, and 1990. The number of respondents able to give complete information increased from the previous survey. Even so, many respondents were not able to provide complete information. As is expected, more complete data was provided for the more recent time periods. For 1970,135 respondents gave data for total area while only 68 could provide data for inhabitable area. The number of responses for total area increases to 163 for 1980 and 173 for 1990. The number of responses for inhabitable area increases from 82 for 1980 to 104 for 1990. Thus, for the most recent data requested, 92.5% of the respondents provided information on total area and 55.6% provided information regarding inhabitable area. While the percentage of respondents providing information on total area is unchanged from the previous survey, the percentage of respondents providing data on inhabitable area has increased by 12.7%. South Korea provided the most complete information.

Data in this section was occasionally incomplete or unidentifiable, for example: total area sometimes appeared to be reported in miles2 or acres and inhabitable area was given as a percentage. The lower rate of response regarding inhabitable area demonstrates that many administrators still lack access to basic information regarding their cities' size. One goal of this
survey is to illustrate such problems and help stimulate greater access to such information.

A vast majority of respondents were able to give information regarding total area. The data from the most recent of these three periods (1990) is shown in Table 1-1. Of the cities represented here, the largest (17,481 km2) is in China and the smallest (1.74 km2) is located in The Philippines. The overall average size for the 173 cities providing data on total area is 810km2. Table 1-1 gives detailed information regarding total area for 1990 by country. Values have been round to the nearest km2.

Table 1-1
Total Area by Country

b. Population: Data was requested for the total population, the population by sex, and the population of three age groups (below 15, 15-64, 65 and over ) for 1970, 1980, and 1990. As with total area and inhabited area, the rate of responses regarding population increased for the later periods. While 20 respondents could not provide data on total population for 1970, only 3 could not for 1990. Data on population by sex also is quite complete with 96.26% of the respondents providing data. Population by age is the area where the least data was available to the respondents. Even so, 73.8% of the respondents provided information regarding population by age for 1990. Respondents' access to data on population, as well as area, is improving.

As stated earlier, this project focuses on medium-sized cities with populations between 100,000 and 4,000,000 inhabitants. Thus, as would be expected, the populations of the cities in this survey to fall within or, at least, are near the range established by the definition of medium-sized cites stated above. Only 4 cities have populations below 100,000. Of the 184 respondents providing data on total population, 112 indicated that their cities have a population between 100,000 and 500,000. Populations between 500,000 and 1 million are given for 28 cities. The remaining 40 cities have a total population of over 1 million.

Table 1-2
Population Cities by Country

c. Number of Households: Respondents were asked to provide data on the number of households in their cities. The number of households can give some indication of family size. Again, this question was retained in its previous form from the last inquiry. As has been the case with the previous parts of this section, data is much more complete for more recent time periods. While 126 (67%) respondents reported data on the number of households for 1970, 178 (95%) of the respondents reported data for 1990.

Table 1-3
Number of Households by Country

By comparing the number of households with the total population and total area, we can ideally get a sense of family size.

Table 1-4
Average Family Size by Country

This table shows Japan, China, and South Korea have the smaller average family sizes. According to other social indicators Japan and South Korea are the more economically developed countries represented here. China's population control programs have lead to its low average family size in urban areas.

d. Density: Population density can simply be determined by looking at the data for total area, inhabitable area, and total population. In previous surveys, to determine population density, the data for total population was divided by the total area. Using the data given for inhabitable area as the denominator should ideally give a better indication of the actual population density, but, as can be seen below, the numbers indicated by this method are unrealistic in many cases. These inflated population densities show that, in many cases, the respondents have underestimated the extent of their cities sprawl. The following table shows information regarding population density.

Table 1-5
Average Population Density by Country