Urbansiation 1. What is urbanisation?

First we need to distinguish between rural and urban 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] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_area 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 to give you an introduction http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/514.bb.wmv

What do you notice about urban growth in the time shown? What is urbanisation? 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. What do you notice about urban growth in the time shown?

What is urbanisation? The number of people living in urban situations in MEDCs was greater than those in NICs/LEDCs but since 1970 this situation has reversed . The size of the big cities has changed. In 1900 there were only 2 – London and Paris – with more than 1 million – now there are more than 400. As the biggest ones have got even bigger the term mega city has been used to describe for with more than 10 million. In 1970 there were only 4. In 2000 there were 15 and the UN estimate that by 2015 there will be at least 26 – over half of them in Asia.

What do you notice about their distribution? Are the mostly MEDC or not? Which continent has the most?

So how did it all begin? Back in history, nomadic hunter-gathers did not settle any where. 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.

So how did it all begin?(2) 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.

So how did it all begin?(3) As areas came together in tribes or states, then the most important settlements took on roles of defence , government and finance. At this time most people were still involved in primary production, so the rural population was still the majority. But, as agriculture has become more mechanised and secondary industrial production moved away from workshops and into factories, the urban areas have grown and grown. However, 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.

So in summary Urban growth is linked to development. As country gets wealthier, fewer people work in the primary industries, farming, mining and wood production, that are based in rural areas. More people work in manufacturing occupations (secondary) and in the service industries (tertiary), which are found almost exclusively in urban areas. The growth of urbanisation on LEDCs is because of the expansion of secondary economic activity the push and pull factors lead to high rural-urban migration cities experience high rates of natural rates of increase (those living there tend to younger and so have their children there)

Will urbanisation continue to grow? Looking at the percentage of urban dwellers by continent, in some areas the % is increasing quite quickly still. Which are increasing most at the moment? Look at the slope of each line between 2000 and 2010. Which are the fastest growing areas?

Will urbanisation continue to grow? I hope you saw 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. [ http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop 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 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 leaving the cities and why? When did the people who lived in Inner London started to leave? Where does it appear some of them might have gone? Moving out of the centre is know as suburbanisation. What might do you think inner London may have been like towards the end of the Victorian Age 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 – these would all push the people away. 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.

Who are leaving the cities and why? 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. The houses even had small gardens. 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 still 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. But 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.

Who are leaving the cities and why? Look 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. 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. This is counter urbanisation. 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.

Review 1. What is urbanisation? 2. Where did it happen first of all? 3. Where is most urbanisation taking place now? Why? 4. What are the causes of urbanisation? 5. What is suburbanisation? Why did it happen? 6. What is counterurbanisation? Why did it happen?

2. What affects the rate of urbanisation and the emergence of mega-cities?

We looked at some of the reasons … Businesses settle in cities because the infrastructure of transport, services, labour and so on while people go there for improved job prospects, better schools and health facilities etc. We have got an idea of why, but have yet to tackle what affects how fast it happens. Only 20 years ago there were only 171 million cities but now there in excess of 400.

Each dot represents a one million city in 2006. Where is there the most red? So there is a concentration in China and another across the Indian sub-continent – and surprisingly another in Germany – so that it where most of them are now, but are all these areas increasing in the number they are getting?

Take a look at the graph on the left – I know the x-scale is not regular – the graph would not let me do that, but you can see the drift. Note this is a bit of an odd graph the pink numbers on the right refer to the world total line and the violet numbers on the right refer to the continent bars. The lilac in Europe is increasing, but taking a look at the yellow for Asia!

But are there any patterns as to why this is happening? To find GDP per capita you need to take the total income generated by a country, area or district – this is the Gross Domestic Product. You then divide the GDP by the population to get the income per person – ‘per capita’ means for each head. Now in general I hope you can see that the poorer the country is (the lower the GDP), the faster its cities are growing, and that for the richest countries, the growth is virtually non-existent. The latter idea ties in with the counterurbanisation we discussed in the last section.

But are there any patterns as to why this is happening? Here is another graph pattern: We know that one of the pulls towards the city is the possibility of a higher income. The numbers along the bottom is the urban/rural income gap. At 1, the urban/rural incomes are roughly the same. At 2, the urban income is twice as much as the rural one. At 3 it is 3 times as much What is the pattern?

Mega-cities Cities with more than 10 million population How many are in HICs? Which are the largest 3 mega-cities? Which continent has the most?

Why are they occurring now? Only 60 years ago there were only 3. Rapidly increasing population, mechanisation of agriculture, industry moving from MEDCs to NICs and LEDCs etc. You have enough to cover this topic. However, I did find a brilliant document put out by the German Central bank of all people, from which a number of these graphs were obtained (Thanks guys!). I have put a copy on the wiki. Feel free to explore!

One final idea: What is a primate city? A primate city is one that has much more than twice the population of the next biggest city. An example is Lima (Peru) that is more than ten times larger than the next settlement or Mexico City in Mexico. The presence of a primate city in a country may indicate an imbalance in development — usually a progressive core, and a lagging periphery, on which the primate city depends for labour and other resources. What this means is that while the primate city can develop, the rest of the country has a hard time keeping up, because all the jobs and investment and services are concentrated there.

One final idea: What is a primate city? To an extent this applied to the UK London had a substantially higher standard of living until redevelopment became a key issue for the EU and UK government. From the graph, you can see that housing is still an issue,

Here is an interesting graph It is about the average disability free life expectancy by region. What does that mean? What does it show?

In summary We have look at where? And why? And how they are changing. Next week we will look at issues for LEDC cities and what they are doing about it. Later on we will look at patterns of development of cities and how they have changed and what is happening now to cities in MEDCs.