BANGKOK, Thailand — The classic image of Asia is rural: A peasant in straw hat stooped over in a verdant green checkerboard of rice paddies. But the bucolic vision of Asia is being rapidly transformed.
By the year 2020, according to projections by the United Nations, most of Asia's population will live in cities. The new image of Asia is a slum dweller, living without such necessities as sanitation and fresh water and commuting to a factory job through increasingly gridlocked traffic.
According to the study, prepared by the U.N.'s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the urban population of the continent is expected to swell from the present 990 million to 2.44 billion in 30 years.
Most of the urban growth will take place in China and India, the world's most populous countries, but the trend stretches from Bangkok to Jakarta and includes such low-income countries as Pakistan and Bangladesh.
"It's a very big problem because the authorities in most cities simply can't cope," said Jens Overgaard, head of the U.N. commission's human settlements office. "The large cities in most of these countries have simply been overwhelmed."
Some cities in China have such bad air pollution that they are no longer visible when photographed from satellites circling above. In Manila, the city is so impoverished that 12,000 people live in a garbage dump called Smokey Mountain.
As jobs dry up in the countryside, millions of rural migrants have been lured by the prospect of relatively well paying factory jobs in the cities. As Overgaard notes, if you chart a country's economic performance and the rate of urbanization, they rise together.
The problems have arisen because most of Asia's economic growth has taken place in the last two decades, and governments have been slow in planning and paying for the kind of development a large city needs--highways, mass transit, sewage treatment plants, even electricity generating capacity. There is little regulation, and what rules exist are often ignored.
Consider Thailand's predicament, which is fairly typical of the Asian experience. A nation of 58 million people, it has climbed from among the world's poorest 20 years ago to the middle class of industrial nations--not rich, perhaps, but getting wealthier.
Many of Thailand's poor villages in the north and northeast seem eerily deserted because they are inhabited only by children and old people. Virtually every able-bodied adult has gone to Bangkok to find work.
Mechai Viravaidya, who heads a community development group, said that since most land in Thailand is not irrigated, workers, on average, earn 12 times more in non-agricultural jobs than they do on the land.
"The attraction of the cities is employment," Mechai said. "They are bringing bodies to meet machines."
Bangkok's population grew at an annual rate of 4.12% between 1970 and 1990, and today it stands at about 8 million. The greater metropolitan area already extends in a radius of 60 miles from the center, and Utis Kaotien, a government urban planner, reckons the population will grow to 15 million by early next century.
"Because of a lack of planning, the city is sprawling," Utis said. "It's very expensive to serve this kind of development pattern. We recognize that hardship is increasing at a great rate." Only in the past few years have Thai officials awakened to the seriousness of the problem.
Traffic in Bangkok has become legendary. Cross-town trips of four and five hours have become commonplace, and buses collect children for school at 5:30 a.m. Last month, one of Bangkok's overworked traffic police officers became a national hero when he went mad at a crowded intersection, turned all the lights to green and danced a jig in the snarled traffic.
Largely because of the traffic, there has been a sharp rise in respiratory problems and lead poisoning, which can affect a child's development. Businesses complain that their employees arrive at work exhausted and barely able to stay awake.
"Everybody is at the scream level," said Joe Maier, a Roman Catholic priest who runs an organization working to help the city's slum dwellers.
Despite the country's booming economy--growing by 8% a year for a decade--the number of people in Bangkok living below the poverty line also continues to increase. According to 1991 statistics, the city's poor have nearly doubled in number in the last 30 years, with 35% of the population now living in slums.
According to Maier, real estate speculation has eaten up a third of the slum land formerly used by the poor for housing. Now, three families may occupy the same space as one family did a decade ago.
Bangkok is not alone. According to the U.N. study, 54% of city dwellers in Indonesia live in squatter settlements, compared with 47% in Bangladesh, 36% in India and 28% in the Philippines. Overall, a third of Asia's urban dwellers are estimated to be squatters or slum dwellers.
