Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical
growth of urban areas as a result of rural migration and even suburban
concentration into cities, particularly the very largest ones. The United Nations projected that half
of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008.
It 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
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 village 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, Mumbai, Delhi, Manila, Seoul and Beijing are each already
home to over 20 million people, while the Pearl River Delta, Shanghai-Suzhou, Jakarta-Bandung and Tokyo are forecast to
approach or exceed 40 million people each within the coming decade.
Causes
Urbanization occurs as
individual, commercial, and governmental efforts to reduce time and expense in
commuting and transportation while improving 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
largest of the developing countries cities, was sold and seen an attempt to
balance these the negative aspects of urban life while still taking being able
to access to a large extent such shared resources.
Cities are known to be places
where money, services and wealth 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.
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 (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. Similar problems now affect the
developing world, rising inequality resulting from rapid urbanisation 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. 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 urban heat
island has become a growing concern and is increasing over the
years. 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 °F (1 to
6 °C) warmer than surrounding landscapes. Impacts also include
reducing soil moisture and intensification of carbon dioxide emissions. This
can be considered a "positive" or "negative" effect
depending upon what kind of climatic conditions one lives in and what is
desired.
Pollution and lack of vegetation,
especially trees, can cause urban areas to suffer from poor environment, but no
general statement about environmental quality can be made to apply to all rural
and urban areas. While urban areas are almost never thought of as pristine,
there are certainly no lack of rural areas that suffer from severe
environmental problems.
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. This view, however,
is not uncontested.
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