New Forms of Urbanization

Beyond the Urban-Rural Dichotomy

Graeme Hugo, Tony Champion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138254831
• eBook ISBN: 9781351914956
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

There is increasing appreciation in the social sciences that context is an important element in understanding social, economic, cultural, political and demographic processes. An important element in context is the type of settlement in which people live and work and so, it is vital to be able to categorise people into particular settlements types. This book brings together a leading team of social scientists to present the latest information on urbanization around the world, highlighting examples of development patterns that are not adequately captured by the UN's type of reporting systems and drawing attention to other ways of representing current trends.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Introduction: Moving Beyond the Urban-Rural Dichotomy

Tony Champion and Graeme Hugo

There is increasing appreciation in the social sciences that context is important in understanding social, economic, cultural, political and demographic processes. An important element in context is the type of place in which people live and work, hence it is important to be able to categorise them according to their situation within the human settlement system. Unfortunately, at present the only such contextual element that is widely captured in standard population data collection systems is a categorisation of areas into either urban or rural. As mentioned in the Preface, this approach was adopted by the United Nations at the outset of its statistical reporting at the end of the 1940s and continues to provide the principal basis for the publication of official statistics on world urbanization trends and projections.

In recent decades, however, the basis of this approach has been increasingly undermined by the massive changes that have been taking place in the size, extent and nature of settlements. In particular, these changes have involved the blurring of the urban-rural distinction. There is no longer any clear dividing line between town and countryside for individual settlements or their inhabitants: indeed, many people reside in one but work in the other. Moreover, in more heavily populated regions, formerly separate cities and towns have merged together into much more extensive urbanized zones. These changes were recognised over 40 years ago in Gottmann's (1961) concept of 'Megalopolis', a phenomenon that today appears to be as common in the less developed as in the more developed regions of the world. As a result, there is now a pressing need to reconceptualise our thinking on human settlement systems and devise new classifications of settlement which capture the diversity of the contemporary and evolving scenes.

Many people, including both academics and governmental bodies, are currently wrestling with the question of the most relevant frameworks to use for monitoring and analysing the changing patterns of settlements and for planning and providing services for their residents. There now exists around the world a wide array of alternative approaches, including extended metropolitan regions, metropolitan areas, functional urban regions, daily urban systems and local labor market areas as well as ways of subdividing these often extensive spatial units into localities and neighborhoods. In addition, in recent years major strides have been made in the information technology for data collection and processing needed for this work. Thus, while the Preface bemoaned that little has changed in the international monitoring of urbanization since the IUSSP's Goldstein Committee on Urbanization and Population Redistribution made its recommendations nearly 30 years ago, the prospects for introducing new ideas seem much more promising today.

It is in this area of the definition and measurement of urbanization that this collection of essays is intended to make its main contribution. The book brings together the ideas of many of the world's leading researchers and practitioners in this field. In preparing their chapters, they were asked to help towards addressing three fundamental questions:

• Given recent trends, are simple urban-rural classifications of population still adequate for capturing the increasing complexity of the human settlement patterns that now influence people's lives and behavior?
• If not, what are the types of human settlement which need to be differentiated in standard classifications of human settlement systems?
• How can these new concepts of human settlement systems be operationalized and measured in standard data collection systems?

In this way, the book's ultimate goal is the development of a new conceptualization of human settlement systems that can be used in standard population data collection systems, especially population censuses, and thereby provide researchers with datasets that permit more meaningful analyses and more accurate projections of sub-national demographic trends than are currently possible.

The remainder of this chapter sets out in more detail the case for a fundamental rethink of our approaches towards defining and classifying human settlement and outlines the key messages of the contributions that follow. First, it provides evidence in support of the statement that spatial context does still matter in the study of population characteristics and demographic behavior within countries. It goes on to present the justification for the traditional approach of differentiating between urban and rural, before demonstrating its shortcomings in handling new forms of urbanization and settlement change. It introduces a number of suggestions that have been put forward for capturing more satisfactorily the principal dimensions of human settlement systems as they are currently evolving. Finally, the chapter explains how the subsequent contributions in the volume help us to better understand the nature of the challenge as well as provide pointers to the way forward.

Space Continues to Matter in Demography

As just mentioned, it has long been recognized that where people live can be a relevant factor in helping to explain demographic behavior. Most obviously, this is exemplified by the great attention given to studying international variations and trends in fertility and mortality, including tracing the 'diffusion' of the demographic transition across the globe (see Chung, 1970, for a study that specifically does this; also, Champion, 2001). At the same time, this statement is just as true intranationally. Indeed, along with measures of economic output, the proportion of people living in urban areas has been found to be associated strongly with countries' progress through the fertility transition, and there has also been much discussion about whether mortality is subject to an 'urban penalty' or not.

At the same time, completion of the passage through the epidemiological and fertility transitions, and indeed through the urban transition too, does not necessarily seem to lead to an erosion of the importance of place in demography. If anything, interest in variations across space has waxed as settlement patterns have become more complex. For instance, as the urban share of a population has risen, increasing evidence has been found of differentiation in demographic behavior by size and type of urban area and also of variations between neighborhoods within individual cities. Similarly, the degree of heterogeneity within areas defined as rural has also increased.

The power of the urban-rural distinction as a demographic discriminator was demonstrated by some of the earliest analyses undertaken by the United Nations, as it began compiling and publishing population data across the world. For instance, in its first major report on 'urban characteristics and trends', published in its Demographic Yearbook for 1952 (UN, 1952, pp.9-19), a clear association was found between level of urbanization and infant mortality rate. Drawing on an analysis of 61 countries with the relevant data, it was shown that five-sixths of those with a majority of their people living in urban areas had infant mortality of under 50 per 1,000 live births, whereas two-thirds of countries with urbanization levels of below 40 per cent recorded rates of 75 or over (UN, 1952, p. 18). An even more specific urban-rural comparison was made of fertility, using data on the child-woman ratio. As shown below in Table 1.1, the average number of children under 5 years of age per woman of childbearing age was higher in rural than in urban areas for all the countries studied. This was irrespective of their degree of economic development, although the scale of the differential was generally largest for countries with the greatest dependence on agricultural employment.

According to the latest Demographic Yearbook available at the time of writing (UN, 2001a), urban-rural differentials are still evident on most measures. In terms of fertility, live births per 1000 women aged 15-49 remains markedly lower in urban areas. Only a couple of the countries for which this comparison is possible have an urban fertility rate higher than the rural one, while fully half have an urban rate that is 30 per cent or more below the rural (Table 11 in UN, 2001a). In terms of infant mortality rate (IMR), by contrast, there are almost as many countries where the urban rate is higher than the rural rate as where it is lower. Nevertheless, there are some substantial differences between urban and rural levels. In one in six countries, the urban IMR is 20 per cent or more lower than the rural, while there is a similar proportion where it is 20 per cent or more above the rural level (Table 15 in UN, 2001a). This obviously raises the question of what it might be that distinguishes these groups of countries in terms of the forces at work in their urban and rural areas.

Table 1.1 Children under 5 years of age per 1,000 women 15-49 years old, selected countries

Country and year	Children per 1,000 women		Rural excess	Urban/rural ratio
	Urban	Rural
Agricultural countries
Bulgaria 1934	332	520	188	0.64
El Salvador 1950	493	714	221	0.69
Panama 1940	380	761	381	0.50
Romania 1930	321	597	276	0.54
Turkey 1945	365	599	234	0.61
USSR 1926	411	626	215	0.66
Venezuela 1941	441	671	230	0.66
Semi-industrial countries
Ceylon 1946	453	558	105	0.81
Finland 1940	195	370	175	0.53
Iceland 1930	440	535	95	0.82
Ireland 1946	366	461	95	0.79
Japan 1947	434	503	69	0.86
Puerto Rico 1940	409	719	310	0.57
South Africa 1936	404	647	243	0.62
Industrial countries
Australia 1947	353	506	153	0.70
Canada 1951	422	637	215	0.66
Denmark 1948	372	457	85	0.81
Great Britain 1951	332	358	26	0.93
Norway 1930	194	386	192	0.50
Sweden 1945	301	368	67	0.82
USA	383	505	122	0.76

Source: Calculated from UN (1952, p. 17, Table F).

Yet perhaps the most impressive feature of these UN tabulations is the very small number of countries that can be examined in this way. For example, in the table on live births per woman aged 15-49, an urban-rural split is provided for only 37 countries, less than one in six of the 228 countries currently recognized by the UN Population Division. Moreover, the majority of these ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON SETTLEMENT CHANGE
• PART III: CASE STUDIES
• PART IV: CONCEPTUALIZING SETTLEMENT SYSTEMS
• PART V: MOVING FROM THE CONCEPTUAL TO THE OPERATIONAL
• PART VI: THE WAY FORWARD
• Bibliography
• Index