The great processes reshaping our world today can be summed up by the term "globalisation". Together with the communications revolution and massive urbanisation, it is reshaping theorganisation of global space. It is illustrated by technological change, pronounced economic growth, the dominance of giant corporations, ever more open markets and universal consumption. Dramatic developments have occurred in Asia-Pacific trade, investment, labour movements and political cooperation, marked for example by APEC, a giant free-trade area designed to encompass about 60% of the world's population and half the world's economy.

R.F. Watters' profile page

T.G. McGee's profile page

T.G. McGee (editor) is Director, Institute of Asian Research, and Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia. He has carried out extensive research on urbanisation in Asia over the last 40 years. He is the author of The Southeast Asian City (1967), Third World Urbanization (1971), and together with Warwick Armstrong Theatres of Accumulation (1985). More recently, he has co-edited the Extended Metropolis in Asia (1991) and Mega-Urban Regions in Southeast Asia (1995). Ray Watters (editor) was Professor of Geography, Victoria University of Wellington, and specialised in development and social change in peasant and tribal societies in Latin America and the South Pacific. He recently worked in Guizhou, southwest China. Among his books are Poverty and Peasantry in the Peruvian Andes (1994), Shifting Cultivation in Latin America (1971) and Abemama: Social Change in Kiribati and Tuvalu (1983).