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Tuesday 27 January 2015

World Bank says Cambodia, Laos have fastest urban growth in East Asia

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PHNOM PENH (The Cambodia Herald) -- Almost 200 million people moved to urban areas in East Asia between 2000 and 2010 with Cambodia posting the region's fastest growth rate after Laos, the World Bank said Monday.

In a statement released in Singapore, the bank said the figures were contained in a new report and were equivalent to the world's sixth-largest country in terms of population.

The World Bank said the report was the first consistent comparison of urban areas and their populations in East Asia.

"Rapid urbanization is a significant challenge for East Asia, but we cannot manage what we cannot measure," regional vice president Axel van Trotsenburg said.

"We’re releasing this data so urban leaders can get a better picture and take action to ensure that urban growth benefits the increasing number of people moving to cities, especially the poor," he said.

Overall, urban areas in East Asia expanded at an average pace of 2.4 percent a year during the decade studied, with urban land reaching 134,800 square kilometers in 2010.

The fastest rates of growth were 7.3 percent in Laos and 4.3 percent in Cambodia, described by the bank as "mostly rural countries just beginning to urbanize."

Laos and Cambodia were followed by China (3.1 percent), Vietnam (2.8 percent), Mongolia (2.6 percent), and the Philippines (2.4 percent). Although Japan had the second-largest total amount of urban land, it had the lowest rate of increase in urban land among countries studied (0.4 percent).

Cambodia had the fourth-smallest amount of urban land among the countries (after Laos, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste) with Phnom Penh being the only urban area with more than 100,000 people. And although the amount of urban area grew
from 110 square kilometers in 2000 to 160 in 2010, only 0.1 percent of Cambodia's land mass was urban, the lowest proportion (after Laos, Mongolia and Papua New Guinea).

In addition to having one of the fastest growth rates in urban areas, Cambodia had one of the fastest-growing urban populations, expanding 4.4 percent a year from 920,000 people to 1.4 million between 2000 and 2010.

At the the same time, the proportion of Cambodian population defined as urban was the lowest in the region after Laos, growing from 7 percent to 10 percent during this period.

While Cambodia shares many urbanization characteristics with Laos, "there is a striking difference in average urban population density," the report said.

In Cambodia, urban population density was 8,600 people per square kilometer in in contrast to 3,200 in Laos.

The report said that more than 90 percent of the built-up area, urban population and urban expansion of the Phnom Penh urban area was within the boundaries of the municipality of Phnom Penh. But urbanization has spilled over, particularly to the south and west.

The two other settlements in Cambodia sometimes considered cities are Battambang and Siem Reap, although the urban populations of both were less than 100,000 people in 2010.

"Although both remained spatially and demographically very small, they grew very rapidly during this period, with
Siem Reap doubling in size and tripling in population between 2000 and 2010," the report said.

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