The Asian city is in transition, from a situation where the slow stream of influences over the centuries has generated a precarious balance between flourishing but very different urban cultures and subcultures, to what we are now experiencing as a surge of commonalities generated through the dominant forces of globalization. This is creating new strategic functions that continue to have a significant impact on urban form and ways in which the social and economic order of cities are being restructured and reshaped, with intensified spatial patterns along with new cultural identities. The Asian city has, in the past, been the historic repository of monumental religious edifices, palace citadels, and fortifications that signified concentrations of power and elitism. Today it must interface with the wider values of urbanism with its integral but often elusive blend of cultural factors economic functions, social structures, political processes, and other related urban issues that include sustainability and resilience. The outcome is therefore an identifiable and occasionally symbolic result of these inter-relationships and attributes which merge in the distinctive characteristics of urban places that represent the public face of human settlement. By the same token an emphasis on environmental well-being is a neglected aspect of urban growth, accentuated by informal settlements as a result of large-scale rural-to-urban migration of labor, where basic living conditions are increasingly worsened in many years by the impact of global warming, rising sea levels, and seasonal flooding.