Urbanization (also
spelled
"urbanisation") is the physical growth of
urban areas as a result of global change. Urbanization
is also defined by the United Nations as movement of people from
rural to urban areas with population growth
equating to urban migration. The
United
Nations projected that half of the world's
population would live in urban areas at the
end of
2008.
Urbanization is closely linked to
modernization,
industrialization, and the
sociological process of
rationalization.
Movement
Percentage of population which is
urbanized, by country, as of 2006.
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 and Shanghai a century later can be
attributed largely to people from rural communities migrating
there. This kind of growth is especially commonplace in
developing countries.
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% (220 million) in 1900, to 29%
(732 million) in 1950, to 49% (3.2 billion) in 2005. The same
report projected that the figure is likely to rise to 60% (4.9
billion) by 2030.. However, French economist Philippe Bocquier,
writing in THE FUTURIST magazine, has calculated that "the
proportion of the world population living in cities and towns in
the year 2030 would be roughly 50%, substantially less than the 60%
forecast by the United Nations (UN), because the messiness of rapid
urbanization is unsustainable. Both Bocquier and the UN see more
people flocking to cities, but Bocquier sees many of them likely to
leave upon discovering that there’s no work for them and no place
to live."
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". 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 China
, India
, Swaziland
or Niger
, but a far
slower annual urbanization rate, since much less of the population
is living in a rural area.
- 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 naturally from individual and corporate efforts
to reduce time and expense 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, diversity, and
marketplace competition.
People move into cities to seek economic opportunities. In rural
areas, often on small family farms, it is difficult to improve
one's standard of living beyond basic sustenance. Farm living is
dependent on unpredictable environmental conditions, and in times
of drought, flood or pestilence, survival becomes extremely
problematic.
Cities, in contrast, are known to be places where money, services
and wealth are centralised. Cities are where fortunes are made and
where social mobility is possible. Businesses, which generate jobs
and capital, are usually located in urban areas. Whether the source
is trade or tourism, it is also through the cities that foreign
money flows into a country. It is easy to see why someone living on
a farm might wish to take their chance moving to the city and
trying to make enough money to send back home to their struggling
family.
There are better basic services as well as other specialist
services that aren't found in rural areas. There are more job
opportunities and a greater variety of jobs. Health is another
major factor. People, especially the elderly are often forced to
move to cities where there are doctors and hospitals that can cater
for their health needs. Other factors include a greater variety of
entertainment (restaurants, movie theaters, theme parks, etc) and a
better quality of education, namely universities. Due to their high
populations, urban areas can also have much more diverse social
communities allowing others to find people like them when they
might not be able to in rural areas.
These conditions are heightened during times of change from a
pre-industrial society to an industrial one. It is at this time
that many new commercial enterprises are made possible, thus
creating new jobs in cities. It is also a result of
industrialisation that farms become more mechanised, putting many
labourers out of work. This is currently occurring fastest in
India.
Economic effects
In recent years, urbanization of rural areas has increased. As
agriculture, more traditional local
services, and small-scale industry give way to modern industry the
urban and related commerce with the city drawing on the resources
of an ever-widening area for its own sustenance and goods to be
traded or processed into
manufactures.
Research in
urban ecology finds that
larger cities provide more specialized goods and services to the
local market and surrounding areas, function as a transportation
and wholesale hub for smaller places, and accumulate more capital,
financial service provision, and an educated labor force, as well
as often concentrating administrative functions for the area in
which they lie. This relation among places of different sizes is
called the
urban hierarchy.
As cities develop, effects can include a dramatic increase 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 the revolution: 1789–1848 (published 1962
and 2005) 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 specialised
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.
Urbanization is often viewed as a negative trend, but in fact, it
occurs naturally from individual and corporate efforts to reduce
expense 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, diversity, and marketplace
competition.
Environmental effects
The urban heat island has become a growing concern. The urban heat
island is formed when industrial and urban areas are developed and
heat becomes more abundant. In rural areas, a large part of the
incoming solar energy is used to evaporate water from vegetation
and soil. In cities, where less vegetation and exposed soil exists,
the majority of the sun’s energy is absorbed by urban structures
and asphalt. Hence, during warm daylight hours, less evaporative
cooling in cities allows surface temperatures to rise higher than
in rural areas. Additional city heat is given off by vehicles and
factories, as well as by industrial and domestic heating and
cooling units.This effect causes the city to become 2 to
10
o F (1 to 6
o C) warmer than surrounding
landscapes.. Impacts also include reducing soil moisture and
intensification of carbon dioxide emissions.
In his book
Whole Earth
Discipline, Stewart Brand argues that the effects of
urbanization are on the overall positive for the environment.
Firstly, the birth rate of new urban dwellers falls immediately to
replacement rate, and keeps falling. This can prevent
overpopulation in the future. Secondly, it puts a stop to
destructive subsistence farming techniques, like
slash and burn agriculture. Finally, it
minimizes land use by humans, leaving more for nature.
Changing form of urbanization
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 urbanisation 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. Later termed
"white flight", the effect is not
restricted to cities with a high ethnic minority population.
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. This networked,
poly-centric form of concentration is considered by some an
emerging pattern of urbanization. It is called variously exurbia,
edge city (Garreau, 1991), network city (Batten, 1995), or
postmodern city (Dear, 2000). Los Angeles is the best-known example
of this type of urbanization.
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 who wrote: "...the most
important class conflict in the poor countries of the world today
is not between labour and capital. Nor is it between foreign and
national interests. It is between rural classes and urban classes.
The rural sector contains most of the poverty and most of the
low-cost sources of potential advance; but the urban sector
contains most of the articulateness, organization and power. So the
urban classes have been able to win most of the rounds of the
struggle with the countryside..." . 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 urbanisation will require labour intensive
growth, supported by labour protection, flexible land use
regulation and investments in basic services.'
Planning for urbanization
Urbanization can be planned urbanization or organic. Planned
urbanization, ie:
new town 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 (
public parks,
sustainable urban
drainage systems,
greenways
etc) which can be planned before urbanization takes place, or
afterward to revitalized an area and create greater
livability within a region. Concepts of control
of the urban expansion are considered in the
American Institute of
Planners.
New Urbanism
New Urbanism is a movement in urban
planning that began in the 1990s and believes in shifting design
focus from the car-centric development of
suburbia and the
business
park, to concentrated pedestrian and transit-centric, walkable,
mixed-use communities. New Urbanism is an amalgamation of old-world
design patterns, merged with present-day demands. It is a backlash
to the age of suburban sprawl, which splintered communities, and
isolated people from each other, as well as had severe
environmental impacts. Concepts for New Urbanism include people and
destinations into dense, vibrant communities, and decreasing
dependency on vehicular transportation as the primary mode.
See also
Urbanization in the Industrial Age:
References
-
http://www.unicef.org/sowc08/docs/sowc08_table_StatisticalTables.pdf
- World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision,
Pop. Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
UN
- Britannica Futurist Blog
- UN State of the World Population 2007,
UNFPA
- based on 2000 U.S. Census Data
- Park, H.-S. (1987). Variations in the urban heat island
intensity affected by geographical environments. Environmental
Research Center papers, no. 11. Ibaraki, Japan: Environmental
Research Center, The University of Tsukuba.
- "Heat Island Effect" [1]
- "Heating Up: Study Shows Rapid Urbanization in China Warming
the Regional Climate Faster than Other Urban Areas" [2]
- Varshney, A. (ed.) 1993. "Beyond Urban Bias", p.5. London:
Frank Cass.
- Guy Ankerl: Urbanization Overspeed in Tropical Africa,
INUPRESS, Geneva,1986 ISBN 2-88155-000-2
- Glaeser, Edward. Are Cities Dying? The Journal of Economic
Perspectives, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 139-160
External links
Top topics
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
