Gavin W. Jones: demography detective and the mystery of the MURs

Abstract

Upon meeting for the first time on a national urban development strategy project in Jakarta in the early 1980s, Gavin Jones and I were presented with a great mystery: how had decades of slow-growing, involuting cities suddenly turned into a new era of accelerated urbanisation producing mega-urban regions (MURs) of population sizes and geographical reach having no historical precedent? In 2000 we decided to launch a research project aimed at presenting our solution to the mystery. Published in 2008, our study with research teams in six MURs focused on urban agglomerations rather than spatially atomised municipalities; we also went beyond rural-urban dichotomies in defining their size. In the ensuing years, we continued to find that the mystery we had tried to solve remained unattended by key organszations dominating worldwide dissemination of urban data and storylines. Yet we continued to be enthused by the fountain of new approaches to research coming from universities and urban institutes around the world that were building on the type of research we extolled.