Over the past thirty years, China has witnessed an explosive growth of its cities. By 2008, the urban population of China had risen to 607 million (45.7 per cent of the population). Two-thirds of the urban population growth is attributable to rural-to-urban migration. By 2015, the urban population is projected to be 700 million, exceeding the rural population for the first time. By 2030, one billion people will live in China's cities. This growth is being accompanied by a rapid expansion of urban land: between 1990 and 2005, China's urban land area grew by an average of 24,727 square kilometres per year, reaching a total of 2,600,000 square kilometres. In this essay, we examine the history of urbanization in China and explore the effects of the related spatial, physical, and social changes on the environments of the poor. In order to create sustainable urban environments in the coming years, it will be necessary to address the challenges these changes bring with them.

URBANIZATION IN CHINA

Rapid urbanization has contributed to China's economic growth and improved living conditions. From 1981 to 2001, 400 million people escaped poverty and 200 million of those who continue to live below one dollar per day have been provided with assistance. These successes have created new challenges for local authorities in urban areas. They have had to concern themselves with providing housing, improving access to services, and addressing growing inequality. “China has recorded the most spectacular progress in the world, with improvements to the day-to-day conditions of 65.3 million urban residents who were living with one or more factors of shelter deprivation.”

In 1949, China was a predominantly rural society. Only 11 per cent of the population lived in its 69 cities. 5 China's urbanization has passed through three distinct phases: moderate growth, a plateau from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and accelerating urbanization in recent years. In the 1950s, a natural growth of urbanization took place without restrictions as people moved freely from the countryside to the cities.

The Mekong River runs through or along Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In these “Mekong countries”, agriculture provides a livelihood for a larger proportion of the population than the proportion of GDP derived from agriculture. Agriculture also functions as a safety net for the cities: many workers return to the country to work on farms when there is a rise in unemployment. But the degradation of the environment (soil fertility, erosion, increased population density) and climate change threaten the agriculture sector's ability to play these two roles. Plans must be implemented to keep the agriculture sector sustainable and competitive. Such plans must be adapted to the fact that farmers are financially fragile. Most of their revenue is absorbed by day-to-day expenses, and their investment capacity is low. Also, population growth has saturated the available cultivable lands. As the capacity of urban areas to accommodate rural migration has in most cases reached its limit, crop cultivation is being extended to less fertile areas, often with slopes where erosion happens. Such areas are typically in the peripheral region of Cambodia, the hilly areas of Sayaboury in Laos, and the highlands of Vietnam. As more and more marginal land is being cropped, the sustainability of this activity decreases and the rate of rural poverty increases. Within the Mekong countries rural poverty usually is higher than the national average, and it is higher than rural poverty elsewhere in Asia.

The Mekong countries agriculture is based on irrigated rice, but this system has reached its limits. For rain-fed agriculture, even on sloppy areas, direct sowing (or seeding) mulch-based cropping (DMC), also known as “no tillage” systems, is a better choice. This method was originally developed for tropical upland agriculture in central-west regions of Brazil. For some years, the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) funded research and development projects based on DMC. These projects were implemented with the technical and scientific support of the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD) in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

The Southeast and East Asia regions have made major progress in reducing income poverty by bringing down the level of poverty incidence from 57 per cent in 1990 to 16 per cent in 2008 for the US$1.25 international poverty line and from 81 per cent to 28 per cent for the US$2 international poverty line, over the same period. However, living standards for many poor people remain a major challenge due to worsening environmental degradation and increasing vulnerability to climate change. Southeast and East Asia's remarkable economic growth over the last twenty years was often accompanied by environmental stress such as deforestation and overfishing, transformation of green areas into commercial and industrial land, and massive pollution and congestion in mega-cities.

Although the environmental problems of the Southeast and East Asia regions are reasonably well documented, less is known on how environmental policies, climate change mitigation and adaptation measures can be used to further reduce poverty and improve the situation of the poor who frequently live in the most environmentally fragile areas. This book argues that trade-offs between poverty reduction, improvement in quality of environment, and mitigation as well as adaptation to climate change, can be avoided. Policy makers can design policies which manage these three issues together to produce a triple-win outcome: raising the welfare of the population by simultaneously reducing poverty, improving the environmental quality, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.

This book presents empirical observations of this triple-win option in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific. It describes livelihood and income generation opportunities for the poor, as well as environmental policies that directly influence the living standard of low- income people. This book, utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, argues that more triple­win outcomes would be possible for the poor, the environment, and the climate, if awareness of the environment in which the poor live were greater and consequently appropriate policies were implemented.

This chapter characterizes and evaluates the internationalization process on going for twin cities located across the Thai-Lao border and on the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) corridors. Two corridors implemented within the Asian Development Bank (ADB) GMS framework at the beginning of the 1990s have a great importance for Thailand and Lao PDR, i.e. the North South Economic Corridor (NSEC) linking Bangkok to Kunming via Lao PDR or via Myanmar's Shan State, and the East West Economic Corridor (EWEC) linking Moulmein port in Myanmar to Danang port in Vietnam via Thailand and Savannakhet Province in Lao PDR (cf. Taillard, Map 2.2 in this volume).

The “twin cities” can be defined according to multiple criteria. The first characteristic used for this article is the fact that the selected cities are border towns, i.e. located on an international border (the Mekong River between Thailand and Lao PDR) and with some functions directly related to the presence of this border. Furthermore, the other criterion used is a geographic one, implying the existence of two urban centres facing each other on each side of this international border. If they can be linked by an institutional agreement (“twin cities” or “sister cities” agreement), this institutional aspect is an optional requirement, compared to the interactions (formal and informal) existing between the two cities. Finally, the expression “twin cities” should be nuanced as it implies a resemblance or symmetry between the two urban centres, which is limited in reality, in terms of population, urban landscape or economic activities.

This chapter will try to discuss this theoretical frame by studying an example of these so-called “twin cities”, Mukdahan and Savannakhet, focusing on their characteristics, functions and interactions.

Since the end of the 1980s, development of border regions has been supported by national governments as well as international institutions such as the ADB to promote decentralization and enhance cross-border trade and economic cooperation with neighbouring countries (Maneepong 2010, p. 1). In the case of Thailand, border towns have been identified as economic gateways since the 7th National Plan, established for the 1992–96 period (NESDB 1999). For Lao PDR, the largest border towns have been developed under the ADB Secondary Towns project at the end of the 1990s.

China's agriculture has grown rapidly over the last three decades. This is due to the liberalization of markets, rapid technological change, and the “household responsibility system”. When economies grow, they vary in how much the growth benefits the poor. In the recent growth of the Chinese economy, the growth in agriculture benefitted the poor three and half times as much as the growth of the rest of the economy (World Bank, 2008, p. 6). The growth in China's agriculture has been largely responsible for the decline in rural poverty from 250 million in 1978 to 14.78 million in 2007, according to the official poverty line and income indicator. China has largely eliminated the fear of hunger in the country. But these achievements are being threatened by climate change. Some parts of the country are more affected than others. One type of area that is especially sensitive to climate change is the ecotone, that is, where two different ecological communities (e.g., forest and grassland) border and overlap. Poor people who live in such areas are finding it even more difficult to overcome their poverty. The Chinese government's efforts to mitigate climate change often unintentionally make life more difficult for them.

CLIMATE CHANGE, FOOD PRODUCTION, AND POVERTY

Influence of Climate Change on Food Production

Climate change will cause productivity in the farming of major food crops to decline and be unstable in China. As a result of the increase in temperature and the decrease in water and arable land expected for the next twenty to fifty years, the period of crop production will be shortened and food production will be threatened. The production levels of China's three main food crops (rice, wheat, and maize) are expect­ ed to decrease by 14 per cent to 23 per cent, not taking into account possible adaptation measures (Lin Erda et al. 2008). See Table 3.1.

Southeast Asia and East Asia have been hailed as success stories of economic growth, but poverty, the environment, and climate change remain major challenges. Poverty reduction is often said to compete with efforts to save the environment and respond to climate change. It is also argued that policies on the environment and climate change should not be carried out at the expense of eradicating poverty or promoting economic growth. This book tries to show that it is possible to reduce poverty, protect the environment, and respond to climate change at the same time — if certain policies are followed. The book provides evidence from Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific as a basis for recommending triple-win development policies. To emphasize the relationships between the three “wins”, the book introduces a spatial approach to poverty, one that focuses on the environments in which the poor live, i.e., regions where the environment — often aggravated by climate change — are major determinants of poverty. These areas are flood-prone and disaster-affected lands, uplands, coastlands, dryland, and slums.

“Environments of the Poor” was the theme of a conference which the Asian Development Bank and seventeen development partners organized on 24–26 November 2010 in New Delhi. 1 The papers on Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific at this conference were revised and edited for this publication. The papers on South Asia make up a separate volume, being jointly published by Oxford University Press of India and the Asian Development Bank. A third volume will be published that includes papers of a more general nature, including the conceptual background. The main title shared by all three volumes is The Environments of the Poor.

This volume is published jointly by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), with co-financing from the ADB Institute. Armin Bauer of ADB is editor- in-chief for the whole project, and he also designed the book cover.

Lao PDR lies in the centre of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), an area which has received substantial investment from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and other institutions with the aim of further integrating the GMS member states’ economies. Economic corridors (i.e. regional transport infrastructure) are a key element of the ADB's strategy and Lao PDR is traversed by three of these: the Northern Economic Corridor (NEC, linking Northern Thailand with Southwest China via Northwest Laos), the North-East Economic Corridor (linking Northern Thailand with Northeast Vietnam via Vientiane and Northeast Laos), and the East-West Economic Corridor (EWEC, linking Eastern Burma with the port of Danang in Central Vietnam via Northeast Thailand and Savannakhet Province, Southern-Central Laos). In the eyes of the ADB and the Lao government, the planned road grid in the GMS will place Lao PDR at the centre of the Subregion's transport network and thus transport the country out of her geographic and economic isolation, one of the chief causes (in the view of political and economic decision-makers) of its structural vulnerability.

This chapter focuses on a border area straddling the districts of Sepon and Hướng Hoá between southern Laos (Savannakhet Province) and central Vietnam (Quảng Trị Province) (see Map 16.1). Hướng Hoá-Sepon area is traversed by Road No. 9, which forms the backbone of the East-West Economic Corridor. This border area includes two border towns: Lao Bảo on the Vietnamese side and Densavanh, its twin town on the Lao side. The populations living in this area comprise the Bru, an upland population, who belong to the Austro-Asiatic ethno-linguistic family; the Phutai, a Tai-speaking population, who mainly live in the lowlands of Sepon district; and the Kinh, the dominant ethnic group in Vietnam, who reside in both the uplands and the lowlands of Hướng Hoá district.

Roads in developing countries have generated contrasting comments. Governments and international aid agencies generally stress the beneficial impacts of new or upgraded roads on local economies and communities. On the other hand, these positive effects are being frequently downplayed, if not downright refuted, by NGOs and academics (Colombijn 2002, pp. 595–98).

The poverty headcount ratios of the emerging market economies of Thailand and Vietnam have declined impressively (World Bank 2008). However, the rural areas are still much poorer than their urban counterparts (Healy and Jitsuchon 2007). Furthermore, the environments in which the poor live make them more dependent on agricultural and natural resources. Hence, climate change is especially affecting the rural poor (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Nguyen 2010). But little is known about how the poor perceive climate change or how it affects their livelihood. In general, vulnerability to poverty remains a major problem in emerging market economies such as Thailand and Vietnam, especially in the low-potential and poorer geographical areas, where infrastructure is weak and insurance and credit markets are often missing. For example, it was found in Thailand that agriculture in low- potential areas is often performed by the elderly, as part-time farmers who adjust their farm organization in response to the outmigration of younger household members (Gödecke and Waibel 2011). Such farmers are probably less inclined to adopt the sort of new agricultural technology that could reduce the negative effects of climate change.

In this essay we analyse the perceptions of the members of rural households in Vietnam and Thailand as expressed in a comprehensive set of panel data collected in 2007 and 2008 from some 4,400 households. We look at how rural households, especially the poor and vulnerable among them, experienced economic, environmental, and idiosyncratic and covariate shocks. We raise three questions that bear on the planning and implementation of interventions aimed at mitigating the negative consequences of climate change:

• How seriously do rural households take climate-related risks compared to other shocks endured in the recent past?

• How much of an effort do poor and vulnerable rural households make to reduce the impact of climate-related risks?

• Do poor people experience or perceive climate-related risk dif- ferently than the non-poor and do they act differently in coping with it?

In the context of the regionalization process of globalization in Asia, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has skilfully seized opportunities arising from a reversal in post-Cold War national territorial strategies. Between 1992 and 1994, it promoted the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) and has accompanied its development ever since, through the implementation of a regional integration initiative at the scale of continental Southeast Asia. It is the most dynamic ADB-assisted transnational integration programme in East Asia. Far from succumbing to the Asian crisis in 1997, regional integration has actually found its second wind.

The term “transnational”, as used to describe this form of integration, does not correspond to the first acceptation of the prefix trans: beyond (ie. trans-Alpine), nor to supranational configurations such as the Mekong Commission, for instance. The term is used in its second acceptation: across (ie. trans-Siberian), and refers to emerging recompositions within the Greater Mekong Subregion which integrate national constructions by blending two scales of the term “region”: infra-national in French speaking terminology and supranational for the Anglo-Saxons. These recompositions involve entire or partial networking of national territories entailing the emergence of new regional architectures, founded on converging interests between partner-nations. These configurations enable them to recover, on this new scale, a part of national power lost in the whirlwind of globalization.

This process was related to a redefinition of State and regional territorial strategies: regional integration through the expansion of trade in the peninsula severely disrupted, first by colonization, then by decades of war. Five of the six partner-nations of the Greater Mekong Subregion have undertaken a redefinition of their territorial policies. China, Lao PDR and Vietnam have operated a strategic reversal towards transnational integration, while Myanmar and Cambodia have reappeared on the regional stage. Only Thailand has maintained its position: peninsular centre at the main sea entrance portal of the Greater Mekong Subregion.

The end of the Cold War marks far-reaching regional and economic geopolitical transformations: Communist nations shifted from a centralized economy to a market economy. Thailand readapted its model of integration in the world economy in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian economic crisis.

Cross-border twin cities have a particular spatial organization in the sense that geographic proximity is an intermingling factor of urban areas and economic interdependence allowing a transnational development. Their transnational setting, i.e. through a border, covers a multiscalar approach on a provincial scale (within a State) on the one hand, and a regional scale on the other, combining at least two States. This kind of urban layout therefore leads to a spatial reorganization networking a new regional territory which responds to the economic guidelines of partner States (Raffestin 1974; Taillard 2010). Infrastructure networking, administrative harmonization, respective comparative advantages and complementarities have made these urban areas a layout that may support an economic dynamism specific to transnational regions (Maneepong et al. 2004; Taillard 2010; Goldblum et al. 2007). The border is thus no longer exclusively a component of separation, but may also turn into a spatial bridge between two bordered provinces (Arnold 2010).

Among the twin towns bordering Thailand and Malaysia, the Danok- Bukit Kayu Hitam pair may have the greatest potential to be developed into a major growth area. Although the urban and economic layouts fall into the category of a twin city, it has not however been officially stated by the Malaysian and Thai governments so far. It is thus by no means as institutionalized as those at the southern boundary of China, which are discussed in more detail by Sébastien Colin in this book. This study aims to investigate how the twin cities of Danok and Bukit Kayu Hitam may become a peripheral growth centre for both Thailand and Malaysia, thus promoting sustainable development in the region.

This study is organized according to approaches on different scales (see Map 13.1) The following section will provide a local scale by studying the district location and socio-economic backgrounds of Sadao and Kubang Pasu and the twin cities in question. The second part will cover a comparative analysis of the twin cities to determine whether their status may imply identical dynamics; we shall also touch on the institutional framework of the aforementioned cities.