Reader Response to : "Explosive Growth, Asian Cities" Draft 1

In the article “Explosive Growth in Asian Cities: Bright Ideas to Seize the Urban Moment”, Khanna (2015) reports that Asian cities have become the centre of the world’s urbanisation trend within the past decade. The author observes that these cities are experiencing a population influx, and reactive policies to population growth and global warming are becoming ineffective. Khanna states that South-east Asian cities are assuming control with capable governments, enterprising citizens and local infrastructure innovation. She further discusses that the government needs to be productive to build a deep-rooted generative legacy as they face complicated challenges in delivering basic necessities on urban productivity. She concludes that South-east Asian cities are proving that their potential is greater than the difficulties they face. While this may be true to a certain extent, I feel that most of the efforts by the community are often short-lived thus making the urban advancement in South East Asia countries rather slow. Also, it is rather difficult for the third world countries to implement strategies to combat the problems faced.

After reading the article, I was not convinced to how the policies could help in the development of the cities. The writer did not provide concrete examples in which the strategies implemented by the government in Jakarta was effective. However, I find it interesting that through a smartphone application, the locals are able to communicate with the authorities to improve their neighbourhood. The government representative are required to respond with a photo report so that the users are aware of the completion of the request (Anisa, 2015). This mobile app shows great promise in urbanisation but many users are facing a lot of problem with internet connectivity.

This brings to my other point on why investing in “smart” features in an infrastructure should be made priority. Almost everyone possess a smartphone but without excellent signal coverage, it would be close to useless. Khanna stated that Philippines are introducing free Wi-Fi in 997 cities in infrastructures. With this in place, citizens will be able to get online easily thus will be well informed of the situation in the country. These type of investment are vital for cities in Indonesia as they are making use of social media to improve their region. Despite the vision, it is difficult for them to attain investors to the country due to the prevailing land dispute in Java (Bloomberg, 2015).

In conclusion, Khanna’s article represented the potential of some of the South-east Asian cities very well. However, she should further discuss of the difficulties the government has to face with the policies that will be implemented by them. All in all, the hardships that these cities are facing are overshadowed by the effective efforts by the community.