Urbanization is the increasing number of people
that migrate from rural to urban areas. It
predominantly results in the physical growth
of urban areas, be it horizontal or vertical.
The United Nations projected that half of
the world's population would live in urban
areas at the end of 2008. By 2050 it is predicted
that 64.1% and 85.9% of the developing and
developed world respectively will be urbanized.
Urbanization is closely linked to modernization,
industrialization, and the sociological process
of rationalization. Urbanization can describe
a specific condition at a set time, i.e. the
proportion of total population or area in
cities or towns, or the term can describe
the increase of this proportion over time.
So the term urbanization can represent the
level of urban development relative to overall
population, or it can represent the rate at
which the urban proportion is increasing.
Urbanization is not merely a modern phenomenon,
but a rapid and historic transformation of
human social roots on a global scale, whereby
predominantly rural culture is being rapidly
replaced by predominantly urban culture. The
last major change in settlement patterns was
the accumulation of hunter-gatherers into
villages many thousand years ago. Village
culture is characterized by common bloodlines,
intimate relationships, and communal behavior
whereas urban culture is characterized by
distant bloodlines, unfamiliar relations,
and competitive behavior. This unprecedented
movement of people is forecast to continue
and intensify in the next few decades, mushrooming
cities to sizes incomprehensible only a century
ago. Indeed, today, in Asia the urban agglomerations
of Dhaka, Karachi, Jakarta, Mumbai, Delhi,
Manila, Seoul and Beijing are each already
home to over 20 million people, while the
Pearl River Delta, Shanghai-Suzhou and Tokyo
are forecast to approach or exceed 40 million
people each within the coming decade. Outside
Asia, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, New York City,
Lagos and Cairo are fast approaching being,
or are already, home to over 20 million people.
History
From the development of the earliest cities
in Mesopotamia and Egypt until the 18th century,
an equilibrium existed between the vast majority
of the population who engaged in subsistence
agriculture in a rural context, and small
centres of populations in the towns where
economic activity consisted primarily of trade
at markets and manufactures on a small scale.
Due to the primitive and relatively stagnant
state of agriculture throughout this period
the ratio of rural to urban population remained
at a fixed equilibrium.
With the onset of the agricultural and industrial
revolution in the late 18th century this relationship
was finally broken and an unprecedented growth
in urban population took place over the course
of the 19th century, both through continued
migration from the countryside and due to
the tremendous demographic expansion that
occurred at that time. In England, the urban
population jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72%
in 1891.
As labourers were freed up from working the
land due to higher agricultural productivity
they converged on the new industrial cities
like Manchester and Birmingham which were
experiencing a boom in commerce, trade and
industry. Growing trade around the world also
allowed cereals to be imported from North
America and refrigerated meat from Australasia
and South America. Spatially, cities also
expanded due to the development of public
transport systems, which facilitated commutes
of longer distances to the city centre for
the working class.
Urbanization rapidly spread across the Western
world and, since the 1950s, it has begun to
take hold in the developing world as well.
At the turn of the 20th century, just 15%
of the world population lived in cities. According
to the UN the year 2007 witnessed the turning
point when more than 50% of the world population
were living in cities, for the first time
in human history.
Movement
As more and more people leave villages and
farms to live in cities, urban growth results.
The rapid growth of cities like Chicago in
the late 19th century, Tokyo in the mid twentieth,
and Mumbai in the 21st century can be attributed
largely to rural-urban migration. This kind
of growth is especially commonplace in developing
countries. This phenomenal growth can also
be attributed to the lure of not just economic
opportunities, but also to loss or degradation
of farmland and pastureland due to development,
pollution, land grabs, or conflict, the attraction
and anonymity of hedonistic pleasures of urban
areas, proximity and ease of mass transport,
as well as the opportunity to assert individualism.
The rapid urbanization of the world’s population
over the twentieth century is described in
the 2005 Revision of the UN World Urbanization
Prospects report. The global proportion of
urban population rose dramatically from 13%
in 1900, to 29% in 1950, to 49% in 2005. The
same report projected that the figure is likely
to rise to 60% by 2030.
According to the UN State of the World Population
2007 report, sometime in the middle of 2007,
the majority of people worldwide will be living
in towns or cities, for the first time in
history; this is referred to as the arrival
of the "Urban Millennium" or the 'tipping
point'. In regard to future trends, it is
estimated 93% of urban growth will occur in
developing nations, with 80% of urban growth
occurring in Asia and Africa.
Urbanization rates vary between countries.
The United States and United Kingdom have
a far higher urbanization level than India,
Swaziland or Niger, but a far slower annual
urbanization rate, since much less of the
population is living in a rural area. Some
nations make a distinction between suburban
and urban areas, while others do not; indeed,
human conditions within such areas differ
greatly.
Urbanization in the United States never reached
the Rocky Mountains in locations such as Jackson
Hole, Wyoming; Telluride, Colorado; Taos,
New Mexico; Douglas County, Colorado and Aspen,
Colorado. The state of Vermont has also been
affected, as has the coast of Florida, the
Birmingham-Jefferson County, AL area, the
Pacific Northwest and the barrier islands
of North Carolina.
In the United Kingdom, two major examples
of new urbanization can be seen in Swindon,
Wiltshire and Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.
These two towns show some of the quickest
growth rates in Europe.
Causes
Urbanization occurs as individual, commercial,
social and governmental efforts reduce time
and expense in commuting and transportation
and improve opportunities for jobs, education,
housing, and transportation. Living in cities
permits the advantages of the opportunities
of proximity, diversity, and marketplace competition.
However, the advantages of urbanization are
weighed against alienation issues, stress,
increased daily life costs, and negative social
aspects that result from mass marginalization.
Suburbanization, which is happening in the
cities of the largest developing countries,
was sold and seen as an attempt to balance
these negative aspects of urban life while
still allowing access to the large extent
of shared resources.
Cities are known to be places where money,
services, wealth and opportunities are centralized.
Many rural inhabitants come to the city for
reasons of seeking fortunes and social mobility.
Businesses, which provide jobs and exchange
capital are more concentrated in urban areas.
Whether the source is trade or tourism, it
is also through the ports or banking systems
that foreign money flows into a country, commonly
located in cities.
Economic opportunities are just one reason
people move into cities, though they do not
go to fully explain why urbanization rates
have exploded only recently in places like
China and India. Rural flight is a contributing
factor to urbanization. In rural areas, often
on small family farms or collective farms
in villages, it has traditionally been difficult
to access manufactured goods, though overall
quality of life is very subjective, and may
certainly surpass that of the city. Farm living
has always been susceptible to unpredictable
environmental conditions, and in times of
drought, flood or pestilence, survival may
become extremely problematic.
In a New York Times article concerning the
acute migration away from farming in Thailand,
life as a farmer was described as "hot and
exhausting." "Everyone says the farmer works
the hardest but gets the least amount of money".
In an effort to counter this impression, the
Agriculture Department of Thailand is seeking
to promote the impression that farming is
"honorable and secure".
However, in Thailand, urbanization has also
resulted in massive increases in problems
such as obesity. City life, especially in
modern urban slums of the developing world,
is certainly hardly immune to pestilence or
climatic disturbances such as floods, yet
continues to strongly attract migrants. Examples
of this were the 2011 Thailand floods and
2007 Jakarta flood. Urban areas are also far
more prone to violence, drugs, and other urban
social problems. In the case of the United
States, industrialization of agriculture has
negatively affected the economy of small and
middle-sized farms and strongly reduced the
size of the rural labour market.
Particularly in the developing world, conflict
over land rights due to the effects of globalization
has led to less political powerful groups,
such as farmers, losing or forfeiting their
land, resulting in obligatory migration into
cities. In China, where land acquisition measures
are forceful, there has been far more extensive
and rapid urbanization than in India, where
peasants form militant groups to oppose such
efforts. Obligatory and unplanned migration
often results in rapid growth of slums. This
is also similar to areas of violent conflict,
where people are driven off their land due
to violence. Bogota, Colombia is one example
of this.
Cities offer a larger variety of services,
such as specialist services that aren't found
in rural areas. Supporting the provision of
these services requires workers, resulting
in more numerous and varied job opportunities.
Elderly individuals may be forced to move
to cities where there are doctors and hospitals
that can cater for their health needs. Varied
and high quality educational opportunities
are another factor in urban migration, as
well as the opportunity to join, develop,
and seek out social communities.
People located in cities are more productive
than those working outside dense agglomerations.
An important question for the policy makers
as well as for clustering people deals with
the causality of this relationship, that is
whether people become more productive in cities
due to certain agglomeration effects or are
cities simply attracting those who are more
productive. Economists have recently shown
that there exists indeed a large productivity
gain due to locating in dense agglomerations.
It is thus possible that agents locate in
cities in order to benefit from these agglomeration
effects.
Dominant conurbation
The dominant conurbation(s) of a country also
benefit from even more intense concentrations
of the very same things cities offer, making
them magnets for not just the non-urban population,
but urban and suburban population from other
conurbations. Dominant conurbations are quite
often primate cities, but do not have to be.
Due to cases like Greater Manila, conurbation
rather than city is more apt; as a whole Greater
Manila's 20 million is very much a primate
city, yet Quezon City(2.7 million), the largest
municipality, or Manila, the capital, is not.
Measures of a how dominant a conurbation is
can relate to percentage of national output,
wealth, and especially population as a percentage
of an entire country. Greater Seoul is one
conurbation with massive dominance over South
Korea, it is home to 50% of the entire national
population.
Though Greater Busan-Ulsan and Greater Osaka
exhibit strong dominance in their respective
countries, yet they are losing population
to even more dominant rivals, Seoul and Tokyo.
Economic effects
As cities develop, effects can include a dramatic
increase and change in costs, often pricing
the local working class out of the market,
including such functionaries as employees
of the local municipalities. For example,
Eric Hobsbawm's book The age of revolution:
1789–1848 chapter 11, stated "Urban development
in our period [1789–1848] was a gigantic
process of class segregation, which pushed
the new labouring poor into great morasses
of misery outside the centres of government
and business and the newly specialized residential
areas of the bourgeoisie. The almost universal
European division into a 'good' west end and
a 'poor' east end of large cities developed
in this period." This is likely due the prevailing
south-west wind which carries coal smoke and
other airborne pollutants downwind, making
the western edges of towns preferable to the
eastern ones. Similar problems now affect
the developing world, rising inequality resulting
from rapid urbanization trends. The drive
for rapid urban growth and often efficiency
can lead to less equitable urban development,
think tanks such as the Overseas Development
Institute have even proposed policies that
encourage labour-intensive growth as a means
of absorbing the influx of low skilled and
unskilled labour. One problem these migrant
workers are involved with is growth of slum.
In many cases, the rural-urban low skilled
or unskilled migrant workers, attracted by
economic opportunities in urban areas, cannot
find a job and afford housing in cities and
have to dwell in slums. Urban problems, along
with infrastructure developments, are also
fueling suburbanization trends in developing
nations, though the trend for core cities
in said nations tends to continue to become
ever denser. Urbanization is often viewed
as a negative trend, but there are positives
in the reduction of expenses in commuting
and transportation while improving opportunities
for jobs, education, housing, and transportation.
Living in cities permits individuals and families
to take advantage of the opportunities of
proximity and diversity. While cities certainly
have a larger variety of markets and goods
than rural areas, infrastructure congestion,
monopolization, high overhead costs, and inconvenience
of cross town trips team up to make marketplace
competition as often as not worse in cities
than in rural areas.
Environmental effects
The phenomenon of Urban heat islands has become
a growing concern. Incidence of this phenomenon
as well as concern about it has increased
over the years. An urban heat island is formed
when industrial and urban areas are developed
resulting in greater production and retention
of heat. A large proportion of solar energy
that affects rural areas is consumed evaporating
water from vegetation and soil. In cities,
where there is less vegetation and exposed
soil, the majority of the sun’s energy is
absorbed by urban structures and asphalt.
Hence, during warm daylight hours, less evaporative
cooling in cities results in higher surface
temperatures than in rural areas. Vehicles
and factories release additional city heat,
as do industrial and domestic heating and
cooling units. As a result, cities are often
1.8 to 5.4 °F warmer than surrounding landscapes.
Impacts also include reducing soil moisture
and a reduction in re-uptake of carbon dioxide
emissions.
In his book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart
Brand argues that the effects of urbanization
are primarily positive for the environment.
Firstly, the birth rate of new urban dwellers
falls immediately to replacement rate, and
keeps falling, reducing the risk of environmental
stresses caused by population growth. Secondly,
migration away from rural areas reduces the
prevalence of destructive subsistence farming
techniques, such as improperly implemented
slash and burn agriculture.
A July 2013 report issued by the United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
however warns that with the additional 2.4
billion people by 2050, the amount of food
produced will have to increase by 70 percent
straining food resources, especially in countries
already facing food insecurity due to changing
environmental conditions. The mix of changing
environmental conditions and the growing number
of people living in urban regions, according
to UN experts, will strain basic sanitation
systems, health care, and potentially cause
a humanitarian and environmental nightmare.
Health effects
According to a major study done by Deakin
University in Uganda, even small changes towards
more urban lifestyles was associated with
increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic
diseases, leading to an explosion in incidences
of heart disease and diabetes These findings
mesh well with the explosion of these very
diseases and rapid urbanization witnessed
in China.
Changing forms
Different forms of urbanization can be classified
depending on the style of architecture and
planning methods as well as historic growth
of areas.
In cities of the developed world urbanization
traditionally exhibited a concentration of
human activities and settlements around the
downtown area, the so-called in-migration.
In-migration refers to migration from former
colonies and similar places. The fact that
many immigrants settle in impoverished city
centres led to the notion of the "peripheralization
of the core", which simply describes that
people who used to be at the periphery of
the former empires now live right in the centre.
Recent developments, such as inner-city redevelopment
schemes, mean that new arrivals in cities
no longer necessarily settle in the centre.
In some developed regions, the reverse effect,
originally called counter urbanization has
occurred, with cities losing population to
rural areas, and is particularly common for
richer families. This has been possible because
of improved communications, and has been caused
by factors such as the fear of crime and poor
urban environments. It has contributed to
the phenomenon of shrinking cities experienced
by some parts of the industrialized world.
When the residential area shifts outward,
this is called suburbanization. A number of
researchers and writers suggest that suburbanization
has gone so far to form new points of concentration
outside the downtown both in developed and
developing countries such as India. This networked,
poly-centric form of concentration is considered
by some emerging pattern of urbanization.
It is called variously exurbia, edge city,
network city, or postmodern city. Los Angeles
is the best-known example of this type of
urbanization. Interestingly, in the United
States, this process has reversed as of 2011,
with "re-urbanization" occurring as suburban
flight due to chronically high transport costs.
Rural migrants are attracted by the possibilities
that cities can offer, but often settle in
shanty towns and experience extreme poverty.
In the 1980s, this was attempted to be tackled
with the urban bias theory which was promoted
by Michael Lipton.
Most of the urban poor in developing countries
able to find work can spend their lives in
insecure, poorly paid jobs. According to research
by the Overseas Development Institute pro-poor
urbanization will require labour-intensive
growth, supported by labour protection, flexible
land use regulation and investments in basic
services.'
Urbanization can be planned urbanization or
organic. Planned urbanization, i.e.: planned
community or the garden city movement, is
based on an advance plan, which can be prepared
for military, aesthetic, economic or urban
design reasons. Examples can be seen in many
ancient cities; although with exploration
came the collision of nations, which meant
that many invaded cities took on the desired
planned characteristics of their occupiers.
Many ancient organic cities experienced redevelopment
for military and economic purposes, new roads
carved through the cities, and new parcels
of land were cordoned off serving various
planned purposes giving cities distinctive
geometric designs. UN agencies prefer to see
urban infrastructure installed before urbanization
occurs. Landscape planners are responsible
for landscape infrastructure which can be
planned before urbanization takes place, or
afterward to revitalize an area and create
greater livability within a region. Concepts
of control of the urban expansion are considered
in the American Institute of Planners.
See also
Contributors to urbanization:
Historical:
Regional:
References
External links
World Urbanization Prospects, the 2014 Revision,
Website of the United Nations Population Division
NASA Night Satellite Imagery – City lights
can provide a simple, visual measure of urbanization
Geopolis: research group, University of Paris-Diderot,
France
Tomorrow's Crises Today – the humanitarian
dimension of urbanization, by IRIN
The Natural History of Urbanization, by Lewis
Mumford
The World System urbanization dynamics, by
Andrey Korotayev
Brief review of world socio-demographic trends
includes review of global urbanization trends
World Economic and Social Survey 2013, United
Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs.
