This Report is based on Urban transformations Shifting from quantity to quality and it is the outcome of a partnership between ESCAP and UN-Habitat, without which the enormous undertaking of reviewing and analyzing urban development trends in Asia and the Pacific would not have been possible. The speed and scope of urbanization in the Asia and Pacific region is unprecedented. It is projected that by 2018 half of the region’s population will be living in urban areas. Currently more than two billion of the region’s total population live in cities and towns – with one billion more likely to be added by 2040.

By 2018, the population of the Asia and Pacific region is expected to become more than 50 percent urban – the point at which the region can no longer be understood as predominantly rural. This historic change and how it is managed is arguably the biggest challenge facing the Asia and Pacific region’s governments and cities at the start of the 21st century. For this is the urban century: the first in which the number of people living in towns and cities is greater than those living in the countryside. The region’s urbanization also has important global implications. In 2014, 55 percent of the the worldwide urban population was living in Asia and the Pacific.