Urbanization

For the first time in history, the majority of people worldwide live in towns or cities, a 21st-century global phenomenon referred to as the arrival of the “urban millennium.” At the beginning of the 20th century, less than 5% of the world's population lived in cities. Whereas, from 1950 to 1975, population growth was more or less evenly divided between the urban and rural areas of the world, in the period since 1975, the balance has tipped dramatically in favor of urban growth. According to the 2009 UN Human Development Report, urban growth rates averaged 2.6% per year between 1950 and 2007. In 2008, over half of the world's population lived in urban areas, and, by 2050, this will have risen to 70%.

Urbanization, described as “a collective term for a set of changes, which generally occur with the appearance and expansion of large-scale coordinated activities in a society” (Tilly, 1964, p. 16), has acquired top priority within, as well as outside, well-established disciplines dealing with the phenomenon of urbanization; today it is a key topic in interdisciplinary analyses (e.g., economics, sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology). Political decision makers [Page 1720]at all levels call for research to address problems linked to rapid urbanization, from migration, food price rises, climate change issues and resource depletion, and conflict related to each of these problems from a perspective informed by a multidimensional view of poverty, as expressed, for example, in the Millennium Development Goals. At present, these problems are shaping our ideas about urbanization.

This entry presents inquiries that, over time, have formed our ideas about urbanization and specifies what is universal and what is intrinsic to our present historical era. The fact that only recently we have seen the arrival of the “tipping point” in urban growth does not mean that the phenomenon of urbanization is a recent one. Indeed, the rapid growth of cities worldwide belongs to our time, but urbanization has existed in different historical periods with different characteristics. Yet there are phenomena across time and space linked to urbanization.

Jan de Vries (1984) suggests three interrelated approaches to urbanization. First, “demographic urbanization” would deal with problems related to conducting measurement of the urban portion of total population. Urbanization is studied as movements of people from rural to urban areas with population growth equating to urban migration. A major contributing factor is known as “rural flight.” 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. In modern times, industrialization of agriculture has negatively affected the economy of small and middle-sized farms and has strongly reduced the size of the rural labor market. Key topics in the study of urbanization include what is meant by a city, about which there is little consensus. Statistical measures of individual nations utilize unique criteria for differentiating urban from nonurban settlements. Not even employing an administrative instead of a population criterion can solve the definitional problem because of how these definitions still vary between countries, sometimes even between historical periods within a country.

...