Mapping the endogenous drivers of mega-urbanisation in contemporary urban development

The urbanisation process of recent decades has resulted in new urban structures that can be circumscribed by two standard concepts, namely the megacity and the metropolitan region. One common feature of these new structures is that cities/urban areas are becoming much larger in population as well as spatial size and continue to grow unabated – a trend of “mega-urbanisation”. The planning and administrative systems set up under the traditional urban-rural dichotomy no longer reflect the reality of settlement growth and therefore lead to a blurring of city boundaries and challenges in the management of urban areas. Here we make use of geospatial modeling and open-source data for a high-level spatial-linking approach across multiple scales and a long-term perspective in three distinct socio-economic settings, specifically Germany, Japan and China's Yangtze River Delta region and therefore visualize urban development trends over 45 years. Our mapping indicates that the emergence of megacities and metropolitan regions is primarily driven by endogenous industrial change, particularly between the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy. Our findings shed new light on research in regional development and planning and demonstrate the need to go beyond the prevailing discussion that focuses on advanced producer services in the context of an ever-advancing globalisation process.