Social Sciences
Urbanisation
Urbanisation refers to the increasing population concentration in urban areas, often accompanied by the growth of cities and towns. It involves the expansion of infrastructure, services, and industries to meet the needs of a growing urban population. Urbanisation has significant social, economic, and environmental implications, influencing patterns of employment, housing, transportation, and resource consumption.
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11 Key excerpts on "Urbanisation"
eBook - PDFUrban Planning and Everyday Urbanisation
A Case Study on Bahir Dar, Ethiopia
- Nadine Appelhans(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- transcript Verlag(Publisher)
The UNPDF defines Urbanisation as: “The process of transition from a rural to a more urban society. Statistically, urba-nization reflects an increasing proportion of the population living in settlements defined as urban, primarily through net rural to urban migration.” (UNPDF 2007: 6). This quantitative understanding of Urbanisation is also reflected in the data informing many Urbanisation policies: Referring to the situation on a continental level in Africa, the description of Urbanisation is most commonly described as the shift of population proportions from rural districts to urban areas, expressed in a rural-urban population ratio. The description of demographic Urbanisation, thus, assesses the contribution of in-migration to the growth of towns by comparing towns’ growth to the national growth rate (cf. Potts 2009: 254). Such a demographic description of Urbanisation gives an outline of the general trends of Urbanisation on the African continent in figures, but it also contains 25 insufficiencies of a description limited to a rural-urban population ratio and its understandings of the consequences and requirements of the Urbanisation pro-cess within the affected areas. These generalisations obscure the fact that there are strong regional, national and local differences in the patterns, speed and also the extent of urban growth across certain regions and between the individual cities (Potts 2009: 254). As described, there are two main reasons for this: insufficient quantitative data, and a lack of qualitative interpretation. The sparse quantitative data situation makes it difficult even to depict the extent of the progress and all prognoses are, therefore, subject to high relativity (Boquier 2004, Rakodi 2002). Currently, demographic data cannot sufficiently provide an answer to the question of reasons for Urbanisation.
eBook - PDF- Rodolfo B. Valdenarro(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Delve Publishing(Publisher)
In the year 2010, about 3.5 billion people resided in localities categorized as urban. An urban context can be described widely on the ground of density of population, consolidation of bureaucratic bodies and infrastructure and a different set of livelihood and money creation activities. Urban localities will be noted by the high density of population when contrasted to other localities. While some cities are described by municipal barriers, the majority of urban centers have not been entitled as such. They are essentially distinguished by the presence of bureaucratic structures, for instance, government offices and courts and a relative consolidation of services for instance as commercial institutions such as banks and hospitals. In an urban context, the patterns of occupation and income creation activities will be different and different in rural localities not majorly bound to the production of agriculture. If the locality in inquiry fits some if not all of these elementary components, it can be observed as urban (Birch and Wachter, 2011). Urbanization (or urbanization) attributes to the shift of population from rural localities to urban localities, the continuous rise in the percentage of people residing in urban locales, and how each community acclimates to this transition. It is dominantly the transformation by which cities and towns are created and become bigger as more people start residing and functioning in central localities. Even though the two ideas are sometimes used correspondently, urbanization should be differentiated from the growth of urban centers: urbanization is the percentage of the total state populace residing in localities categorized as urban while urban growth refers to the aggregate number of people residing in localities categorized as urban. The United Nations (UN) calculated that 50% of the global populace would Urban, Urbanization, and Human Population 165 reside in urban locales at the end of the year 2008.
eBook - PDFDimensions of Social Life
Essays in Honor of David G. Mandelbaum
- Paul Hockings(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Any sociological analysis should be concerned with a study of these patterns rather than with the number of people in itself. Similarly people live in a defined space and establish practices and develop values and norms regarding their use of space. Ecological aspects enter into the social relationships of people and get invested with meanings and values. Sociological analysis of urbanism and urbanization is concerned with this emphasis rather than with the physical aspects of space per se (Rao 1974: 3-4). Earlier we spoke of urbanization as social and cultural processes; it will be necessary to clarify this statement. Two kinds of processes need to be dis-tinguished: centripetal and centrifugal. The former is concerned with trans-forming the ways of the people who migrate to the city from villages and also of those living in cities since pre-British days. While in the latter case, people are subjected to a different type of urbanism, in the former the rural im-migrants are subjected to new conditions of urbanism as they participate in new social situations. In the case of rural immigrants, their period of residence in the city provides one of the indices for studying the process of urbanization by which their lives are transformed into urban ways.
eBook - PDF- R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Made Simple(Publisher)
One problem with the sociological approach which defines urbanism as 'a way of life' is that it fails to take into account the physical features of the town—its buildings and streets, and their density and arrangement. Emphasis is on the city-dwellers rather than the city itself. In the face of a bewildering array of definitions and systems of classifica-tion, the United Nations has suggested that no attempt should be made to distinguish between rural and urban populations, and that population agglomerations should be simply classified according to a series of size categories. Indeed, it is increasingly felt that the words rural and urban imply a false distinction, and that there exists a continuum of settlement forms and landscapes from the overcrowded inner districts of the largest cities to the smallest hamlets of the remote country districts. Some writers have even suggested that once large cities come into being, the term rural becomes virtually obsolete, for, with modern communications and the administrative controls exercised by the city, its influence extends to the most remote rural areas in any country. The City in History: Origins and Dispersals The Origin of the First Cities The motivation and processes involved in the establishment of the very first towns are largely a matter of speculation. A necessary precondition must have been the existence of a prosperous, settled agricultural economy to enable the production of a large surplus of storable food to support a non-agricultural urban population. Freed from the work of food production, certain members of the population could thus engage in non-agricultural, specialist trades. Urbanisation 213 The earliest examples of true urban development are thought to have originated on the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys in Mesopotamia between 5,000 and 3,000 B.C.
eBook - PDFUrban Religion
A Historical Approach to Urban Growth and Religious Change
- Jörg Rüpke(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Thus, ‘ city ’ is just an in-vitation to look for the classificatory operations used by people to differentiate and often rank forms of settlements (including nomadic ways of life or transhu-mance). Rüpke 2015c. See Robinson, Scott and Taylor 2016, 18. 3.2 Religion and Urbanisation 51 In the following, I will use ‘ urban ’ as a meta-language term, implying, on the one hand, dense settlement patterns of a large number of people (far beyond the number of inhabitants that would be the upper limit of a community in which it would be possible for all members to maintain face-to-face contacts with all oth-ers) that are characterised by a corresponding density of interaction, and, on the other hand, external links with other settlements that are likewise seen as ‘ cities ’ in the aforementioned culturally and historically variable sense.¹ ⁶ The second el-ement has two important consequences: urban settlements do not appear indi-vidually but in networks – even if these might have only very distant correspond-ing nodes. And urban diversity transcends the mere effect of numbers but is, rather, reinforced by inter-cultural contacts and migration – even if this is re-stricted to more regional variants and distances. On this basis, I follow Susanne Rau in differentiating between ‘ Urbanisation ’ and ‘ urbanity ’ . ‘ Urbanisation ’ , or more precisely Urbanisations, are different and reversible paths of the growth and spread of settlements as ‘ urban settlements ’ ( ‘ the history of the constitution, perception and appropriation of urban spaces ’ ). ‘ Urbanity ’ , on the other hand, is the specific way of life in such cities, defined by the fact that the inhabitants realise that they are living in a city (again, however they define ‘ city ’ ).¹ ⁷ It is Urbanisation as a larger historical process that offers us a ‘ lens ’ through which to view religious change here.
eBook - PDF- Doctor Edgar Pieterse, Susan Parnell(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Zed Books(Publisher)
Drawing on the work of economic historians and historical demographers, I sketch the stylised facts of world Urbanisation in the pre-industrial era and articulate an integrated, 14 | Fox 259 historically grounded explanation of Urbanisation based on these observations. I then apply this theory to Urbanisation trends in Africa. First, I offer statistical evidence that cross-country variation in colonial experience – an important historical determinant of institutional and technological change – accounts for a significant proportion of the variation in patterns of early Urbanisation in the region. Second, I examine the dynamics of African Urbanisation in the postcolonial era and demonstrate empirically that ‘Urbanisation without growth’ and exceptionally rapid urban population growth are largely accounted for by sub-Saharan Africa’s unique historical circumstances and population dynamics. I conclude with a brief comment on the policy implications of the theory and evidence presented here. Economic and demographic theories of Urbanisation The traditional economic theory of Urbanisation, which has dominated in both academic and policy circles since the 1950s, revolves around the relation-ship between structural economic change and the spatial dynamics of the labour market. The premise is straightforward: as the modern urban sector (i.e. manufacturing and services) expands, surplus labour from the ‘backward’ rural economy (i.e. agriculture) is drawn to towns and cities, attracted by higher wages (Lewis 1954; Fei and Ranis 1964). In other words, this economic model suggests that Urbanisation is fundamentally driven by rural-to-urban migration stimulated by a wage gap between rural and urban areas that arises in the early stages of industrialisation.
- Singh, N. Deva(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Regency Publications(Publisher)
Chapter 3 Urban Change: An Overview N. Deva Singh Urban areas are the most complex creation of human being on earth’s surface where the best and worst forms are present. They represent past, present and future of human civilizations. The physical manifestations of history and culture, industry and technology and incubators of innovation and creativity are found in towns and cities according to the ambition and aspiration of people. The urban habitation of city exposes such a landscape which symbolizes beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, where we see the materialization of humanity’s noblest ideas otherwise repository of society’ ills(State of the World’s Cities, 2008/2009). Every country of the world has interest to build up healthy and sustainable cities, so that strong national economy would be derived by creating wealth, enhancing social development, generating employment and providing economic avenues. However, improper plan and weak governance often bring worse situation in urban areas by creating breeding grounds of poverty, crimes, congestion and pollution, environmental degradation etc. Day by day, the population of urban areas is increasing very fast and half of humanity of the world lives in urban areas now. It is estimated that within the next two decades 60 per cent of the world’s population i.e. above four billion persons will be residing in urban. As such, world is increasingly an urban world and the 21 century will be the century of the city (Ban-Ki Moon, Secretary General, UN, 2008). As urban areas steadily expand and have rapid increased population growth, the spatial, social, environment aspects and characteristics of inhabitants are significant for the overall development. But the approach of urban development should not have to create spatial disparities while distributing and installing infrastructure of cities. The rural-urban contrasts need to be reduced considerably in view of having a well organized settlement system in the region.
eBook - ePubUrbanisation and Planning in the Third World
Spatial Perceptions and Public Participation
- Robert Potter(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Figure 2.5 and it is envisaged that high density urban lineaments will eventually connect the urban cores within Latin America, Africa and Asia. The term ‘ecumenopolis’ or world city is used to indicate a functionally integrated urban whole and is obviously not intended to imply complete physical coverage of the world's land surface. In order to produce their forecast, Doxiadis and Papaioannou assumed world populations of 6,430 millions by 2000 and 9,600 millions by 2050, of which 71.5 per cent would be living in cities. They then looked at the habitability of different areas of the globe in 2100 according to climate, elevation, water supply and thereby ascertained areas for possible future urban development. These were then used to define a theoretical configuration of global urban centres and growth axes. The work subsequently projected the likely settlement pattern assuming world populations of 20,000 millions by 2100 and 50,000 millions by 2200. The authors sub-title their book “the inevitable city of the future” and although some may remain unconvinced of this inevitability, the historical course of world Urbanisation and its present speed certainly make such predictions seem increasingly plausible.Figure 2.5: Ecumenopolis-the global prospect? (Source: Doxiadis and Papaioannou ,1974)CITIES, SURPLUSES, ELITES AND DEVELOPMENT: FINAL PERSPECTIVES
Cities and urban modes of living are here to stay and the ways in which individual cities and systems of settlements evolve over the next 70 years and beyond will be crucial variables in the process of global development. One important lesson that can be drawn from the review of Urbanisation provided in the present chapter is that the character and form of Urbanisation and urbanism cannot be divorced from the structure and development of societies as a whole. It follows, therefore, that structurally speaking, changes in societal organisation are needed to effect urban change.We are witnessing the final stages of a process of rapid Urbanisation that started some 5,500 years ago, but which has only become a truly global phenomenon during the past 150 years. Historically, it has been shown that the development of cities has been based on changes in social organisation, so that increasing occupational specialisation and social differentiation are direct correlates of the process of Urbanisation. Thus, some writers argue most strongly that conflicts between social groups have had a direct bearing on the pattern and form of world Urbanisation (Roberts, 1978; Gilbert and Gugler, 1982). Certainly, it is undoubtedly the case that cities have always served and been associated with elite groups, whether a religious and military group as in Mesopotamia, an expatriate elite as in the mercanitle-colonial city or the corporate interests of present-day multinational companies.
eBook - PDFPoverty, Hunger, and Democracy in Africa
Potential and Limitations of Democracy in Cementing Multiethnic Societies
- D. Bigman(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Industrial com- plexes concentrated in the existing urban centers, close to the main ports and highways and in regions that have rich resources; all too often, deliber- ate and highly biased government policies that favored certain regions also had an important impact. Rural–urban migration and growing urban population The exploding population in many African cities has been termed by the UN human settlements agency, UN-Habitat, as “premature urbanization,” because industrial development is meager and cannot offer employment 3.2 The Demographic and Social Changes and the Urbanization of Poverty The Demographic and Social Changes and the Urbanization of Poverty 155 to new migrants. The 2007 report of UNFPA, The State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, estimates that by the end of this decade, more than half the world’s population will live in cities and towns, but in the least developed countries the rural inhabitants will still constitute the majority of the population until 2030 (Figure 3.1) According to the UN report on the World Urbanization Prospects (2007), the rural population in many African countries will be forced by changing climatic conditions to migrate either to other rural areas or to urban centers in search of employment and income. With a rural population of nearly 600 million people, Africa has 17.5 percent of the world’s rural population, and currently about 38 percent of the continent’s population live in urban areas. By 2050, Africa’s rural population is expected to increase by 30 percent and reach nearly 800 million, or 27 percent of the world’s rural population. A growing share of the rural population will have to move, however, to off- or non-farm livelihoods, either permanently or in certain seasons. The conti- nent has an urbanization rate two times higher than that seen during the West’s Industrial Revolution.
eBook - PDFReadings in Urban Sociology
Readings in Sociology
- R. E. Pahl(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Pergamon(Publisher)
Part IV Urbanization This page intentionally left blank The Rural·Urban Continuum 1 R. E. PAHL Editor's Note This paper should be seen simply as a contribution to a continuing discusnon, which has carried on in more recent issues of the journal Sociologia Ruralis. For this reason, the introduction of the discussion of the paper by Eugen Lupri and A, K. Constandse is also included. IN A sociological context the terms rural and urban are more remarkable for their ability to confuse than for their power to illuminate. No one disputes the right of the layman to use these terms to denote different patterns of land use, which are easily observable; what is disputable is the sociological relevance of these physical differences especially in highly complex industrial societies. If indeed there are no fundamental sociological differences between urban and rural then those who call themselves rural sociologists may well doubt the basis of their professional identity. Yet the existence of a Society founded to further rural sociology presupposes that there is a distinctive field to study. It is under-standable, therefore, that I have many predecessors who have developed this theme in previous conferences and it is difficult to put new gloss on well-worn arguments. I will therefore start simply by reminding you of some of them. Rural sociologists in the U.S.A. have traditionally led the field both in research techniques and general conceptuzaliation and 1 The section on the Metropolitan Village in this paper was first read at the 1966 Conference of the British Sociological Association at Leicester. I am most grateful to Dr. Derek Allcorn, Prof. Michael Banton, and Prof. Paul Stirling for their critical comments on a draft of this paper. Of course, I alone remain responsible for the opinions expressed. 263 264 READINGS IN URBAN SOCIOLOGY so perhaps we should give special heed to the warnings they are now giving us.
eBook - PDFWorld Cities Report 2022
Envisaging the Future of Cities
- United Nations Human Settlements Programme(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- UN-HABITAT(Publisher)
ii. Annexation: A town is added to a city. iii. A new city: An area, typically a town or village, grows enough in population and density to be classified as a city. Scenarios of Urban Futures: Degree of Urbanization 46 2.3.2. Expanding cities and new cities One important, and often ignored, driver in expansion of city population is represented by the changes in the classification of an area. So far attempts to explicitly account for the role of reclassification in explaining urban growth have been hindered by the lack of harmonization in the definitions and the absence of detailed boundaries. However, with the new definitions and by using spatial methods applied on population grids, some studies have started to demonstrate how this role is far from being negligible. 23 As population grows, some areas originally classified as towns or rural areas are reclassified as cities and their population starts to contribute to city population growth. The other sources of city population growth are natural change and migration. By applying the classification by Degree of Urbanization at multiple points in time, the impact of the change in classification for each cell can be captured and aggregated. Overall, the spatial expansion of cities and the emergence of new cities are projected to contribute between 20–40 per cent of the growth in city population. However, as highlighted in the previous subsection, most population growth in cities is due to natural change (fixed share) and most of that growth will occur within the initial boundaries of a city, while reclassification will add less and less to city populations (Figure 2.9). Most new cities will be towns that have grown to attaining the threshold for “city” classification as per the Degree of Urbanization harmonized definition. The contribution of these reclassifications is higher in low-income countries and leads to a 5 per cent increase city population per decade.
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