6.1.Urbanisation

1. What is urbanisation? First we need to distinguish between rural and urban. Both UK statistics bodies and Canadian acknowledge that there as many ways to do this as there are statisticians drawing up the definition. //[How many statisticians did they need to change a light-bulb?// //– answer by email to LM]// [] look at other definitions including one different from the Canadian one that I found! However, these 2 groups have come to a more or less consensus, which states if the settlement has more than 10,000 people in then it is **urban** – less and it is **rural**. So we will go with this. Watch this [|BBC video clip]

Urbanization occurs naturally when people and businesses want to reduce time and expense in travelling and transporting goods while improving opportunities for jobs, education, housing, and transportation. Living in cities gives individuals and families the chance to take advantage of the varied and local opportunities. People move into cities for better jobs.. 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 is difficult. 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 in a city. 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, cinemas, 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. Farms become more mechanised, putting many labourers out of work. This is currently occurring fastest in India. So people may be forced to leave the land to find employment, not necessarily aspiring to a much better standard of living, as any job will suffice in a crisis.

So **urbanisation** is the increase in the proportion of people who live in urban environments. Over time more and more people have moved into the larger communities, thus making them bigger still

These tables are some idea of how this has happened – again, whatever list or source you look at the numbers will be different. These differences are down to a number of reasons: How good are the government at collecting census data? Does everyone agree where the city ends? (rarely) Besides which, a lot of people when trying to assess how big an urban area is, want to include the commuting area as well, both in terms of the additional area and the land which becomes part of the **conurbation** (urban area that is the amalgamation of more than one place). Look for patterns: How have the sizes of the biggest cities changed over time? How have the locations of the cities changed over time? How have the cities been linked to cultural development over time? How have the rural/urban populations changed over the last 50 years? How have the percentage of urban populations changed on different continents and how may they change in future? This can be found at : [] and was created by Philippe Rekacewicz, UNEP/GRID-Arendal. **So how did it all begin?** Back in history, nomadic hunter-gathers did not settle any where. But once sedentary farming began to develop, people built houses and cultivated the land around them. But this left them open to attack – far better to put houses in small groups. Once you have a small settlement, then you would find one person maybe was better and making tools that the others –so you got division of labour. There always tended to be a division of labour between men and women – the men would do a bit of hunting while the women stayed around the farmstead and minded the animals and grew the crops. Soon it became obvious that some groups produced more of one sort of good while another might need that but have something else surplus to requirement so trading began. So established routes for traders evolved and you got small settlements building up along the routes, at a river crossing or where 2 routes crossed. Then it seemed sensible to meet up regularly and sell your excess goods and buys from others – so markets began to occur regularly and settlements that had a market would get bigger and prosper. As people became more skilled at making tools, it was more efficient to have the craftsmen making their goods in centres where people came to buy and cell things. So not only were the towns centres of trade but also centres of production. Hence they grew in size and in importance. As areas came together in tribes or states, then the most important settlements took on roles of defence, government and finance. However, at this time most people were still involved in primary production, so the rural population was still the majority. However, as agriculture has become more mechanised and secondary industrial production moved away from workshops and into factories, the urban areas have grown and grown. But even in Europe until the Second World War, more that half the population were involved in primary production in rural areas, but since then, agriculture has required few people and more machines. As service industries have grown and secondary industry has expanded, more jobs that are better paid are in the cities. With the greater availability of health and education in larger settlements, the towns and cities have become more attractive, especially as a country has developed.

**Will urbanisation continue to grow?** Looking at the percentage of urban dwellers by continent, in some areas the % is increasing quite quickly still. To see which are increasing most at the moment, look at the slope of each line between 2000 and 2010 and I hope you can see that Africa, Asia and South and Central America are the steepest. This means they are going up fastest. But we also need to take into account that in all of these places, the population growth is also rapid so this means that not only is the % of people in the cities growing but also the total population. has a model that – at the time of writing – suggested there would be 7 million people on earth during the day of April 9 2010.However other sites I have come across have slightly different models and make 7 Billion Day a bit later If you look at the world figures (see figures/grap h), then it is possible to work out that the general trend towards urbanisation has been fairly steady, increasing at about 4% every 10 years, and this trend looks to continue until 2050. But with those continents where urban population are increasing faster than the average, there are other areas where the growth is much slower or even in decline.

**Who are the inner cities and why?**

So urbanisation in the UK and other highly developed countries is not increasing and London for example has actually lost population over the past 70 years. The people who lived in Inner London started to leave in the 1930s – where does it appear some of them might have gone? The areas that not in the centre of the city are called **suburbs**. Moving out of the centre is therefore know as **suburbanisation.** What might do you think inner London may have been like towards the end of the Victorian Era and in the early parts of the twentieth century? The unpleasant things about an environment that encourage people to leave are called **pushes.** The issues likely to encourage suburbanisation are over crowding, poor housing, too much noise, too much traffic, bad air conditions in the inner city – these would all push the people away. What pulled them out to the suburbs? The underground meant you could get to the centre and to work easily. The GLC (Greater London Council as it was then) built a lot of council estates in the suburbs which has modern facilities such as inside toilets and bathrooms. They had small gardens and there open spaces and parks. The air was cleaner and there was less traffic and noise and was generally a lot healthier. It is still the case that people with families prefer the suburbs as they are safer, cleaner and have less crime. Land was in short supply in the centre. As people who moved to the city earned more money than before, they wanted good quality housing for their families and they could afford to buy it. So many private developments grew up in the suburbs where the land was available and much cheaper that in the centre. But young single people still enjoy living in Central London, although as there is so much pressure on land in Central London it can be very expensive. However, single working people do not need much space and lots of tiny flats can be crammed into a small area. They like the cinemas and clubs and all the shops nearby, as well as museums and lots of activities all within easy reach. So the pull of the city centre is still strong for young people. Read [|here] about how cities in the USA are shrinking, in part due to old industries moving to MICs and in part the recession.

**Who are leaving the city altogether and why?** Looking back at the graph of London’s population, we have talked about why the centre’s population went down in the 1930s and 40s while the population in Greater London did not start to drop until the 1950s. So about 1950, people started to leave the capital all together. THgis is known as **counter-urbanisation** (counter meaning against or opposite to). Where did they go? This was mostly the better-off who could afford cost of long train journeys or had their own transport to travel into town. Later on, in the 1980s, some of the new high-tech firms did not start up in the big cities at all, but chose nicer (and cheaper) surroundings as these industries are often called ‘**footloose**’. The older heavy industries were tied to particular places where the raw materials were but these new industries only needed small amounts of materials or components and so had a greater choice of location. These new industries often looked for localities on the outside of towns near a good road network. So the highly skilled people who want to work in these industries tend to live in small towns and villages around the work place, for example, there is a lot of high-tech industry along the M4 motorway and the workers can choose pretty villages in the Cotswold and Chilton Hills to live in.

Having problems with pushes and pulls and intervening obstacles?
This a model put forward by a person called Lee. The idea is that when ever a person is going to move from one place to another, there are pushes away from where you are, there are pulls towards where you are going but there are things that stop you leaving where you are or are a disadvantage about where you are going - this latter group are known as intervening obstacles. You can see some of the things in the diagram which may stop you from leaving, such as family pressures and things that may discourage you going to the new place such as lack of money. Get some practice in thinking about these things in this exercise. It is about a couple who are livng on the edge of Nottingham but who are thinking of moving out to e village. First of all take a look at the map and click on the markers to see what they say. Then open this and cut up all the table into rectangles. Sort them out into into 5 piles: pushes, pulls, obstacles stopping them from leaving their current home, obstacles discouraging them from moving to village and those items that do not fit into any of these 4. If you are feeling really good, summarise your findings, making sure you use pushes, pulls and obstacles and decide what they should do.

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 * &lt; === What do you need to remember? === ||
 * &lt; * All the words in BOLD
 * Be able to give reasons why urbanisation occured
 * Be able to explain the patterns of urbanisation in different parts of the world
 * To know the different reasons for suburbanisation and counter urbansiation ||