Urbanization

Urbanization (or Urbanisation see here) is a natural expansion of an existing population, namely the proportion of total population or area in urban localities or areas (cities and towns), or the increase of this proportion over time. It can thus represent a level of urban population relative to total population of the area, or the rate at which the urban proportion is increasing. Both can be expressed in percentage terms, the rate of change expressed as a percentage per year, millenia or period between censuses. Urbanization can result from either:

an increase in the extent of urban areas
an increase in the density of urban areas

For instance, the United States or United Kingdom have a far higher urbanisation level than China, India or Nigeria, but a far slower annual urbanisation rate, since much less of the population is living in a rural area while in the process of moving to the city. Australia is at the opposite of the former two in terms of urbanisation rate but also the latter three in urbanisation level, making it one of the most urbanised countries in the world. The rate of urbanisation over time is distinct from the rate of urban growth, which is the rate at which the urban population or area increases in a given period relative to its own size at the start of that period. The urbanisation rate represents the increase in the proportion of the urban population over the period.

In terms of a place, urbanisation means increased spatial scale and/or density of settlement and/or business and other activities in the area over time. The process could occur either as natural expansion of the existing population (usually not a major factor since urban reproduction tends to be lower than rural), the transformation of peripheral population from rural to urban, incoming migration, or a combination of these.

In either case, urbanisation has profound effects on the ecology of a region and on its economy. Urban sociology also observes that people's psychology and lifestyles change in an urban environment.

The increase in spatial scale is often called "urban sprawl". It is frequently used as a derogatory term by opponents of large-scale urban peripheral expansion especially for low-density urban development on or beyond the city fringe. Sprawl is considered unsightly and undesirable by those critics, who point also to diseconomies in travel time and service provision and the danger of social polarisation through suburbanites' remoteness from inner-city problems.

Economic effects

The most striking immediate change accompanying urbanization is the rapid change in the prevailing character of local livelihoods as agriculture or more traditional local services and small-scale industry give way to modern industry and urban and related commerce, with the city drawing on the resources of an ever-widening area for its own sustenance and goods to be traded or processed into manufactures.

Research in urban ecology finds that larger cities provide more specialized goods and services to the local market and surrounding areas, function as a transportation and wholesale hub for smaller places, and accumulate more capital, financial service provision, and an educated labor force, as well as often concentrating administrative functions for the area in which they lie. This relation among places of different sizes is called the urban hierarchy.

As cities develop, effects can include a dramatic increase in rents, often pricing the local working class out of the market, including such functionaries as employees of the local municipalities.

Changing form of urbanization

There are different forms of urbanization, or concentration of human activities, settlements, and social infrastructures. Some suggest that the dominant form of urbanization has been changing over time.

Traditional urbanization exhibits a concentration of human activities and settlements around the downtown area. When the residential area shifts outward, this is called suburbanization. A number of researchers and writers suggest that suburbanization has gone so far to form new points of concentration outside the downtown. This networked, poly-centric form of concentration is considered by some an emerging pattern of urbanization. It is called variously exurbia, edge city (Garreau, 1991), network city (Batten, 1995), or postmodern city (Dear, 2000). Los Angeles is the best-known example of this type of urbanization.

Planning for urbanization

Urbanization can be planned or unplanned. Planned urbanization, as in a new town or garden city, is based on an advance plan, which can be prepared for military reasons, aesthetic reasons or urban design reasons. Unplanned urbanization has taken place throughout history and is now concentrated in shanty towns. Municipal authorities and UN agencies prefer to see urban infrastructure installed before urbanization occurs. landscape planners prefer to see landscape infrastructure (public parks, sustainable urban drainage systems, greenways etc) planned before urbanization takes place.

Examples

Urbanization has in the United States affected the Rocky Mountains in locations such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Telluride, Colorado, Taos, New Mexico, Douglas County, Colorado and Aspen, Colorado. The lake district of northern Minnesota has also been affected as has Vermont, the coast of Florida, the Birmingham-Jefferson County, AL area, and the barrier islands of North Carolina.

In the United Kingdom, two major examples of new urbanization can be seen in Swindon, Wiltshire and Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. These two towns show some of the quickest growth rates in Europe.

References

Batten, D. F. (1995). Network cities: creative urban agglomerations for the 21st century. Urban Studies, 32, 361-378.

Dear, Michael J. (2000). Postmodern urban condition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fischer, C. S. (1975). Toward a subcultural theory of urbanism. American Journal of Sociology 80, 1319-1341.

Fischer, Claude (1976). The urban experience. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Gans, Harbert J. (1962). The Urban Villagers: Group and class in the life of Italian-Americans. New York: MacMillan.

Garreau, Joel. (1991). Edge city: Life on the new frontier. New York: Anchor Books.

Simmel, Georg. (1903 trans. 1971). Metropolis and mental life. in On Individuality and social forms ed. by Donald Levine. trans. by Edward Shills. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Tonnies, Ferdinand (1887 trans. 1988). Community & society, with an introduction by John Samples. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.

Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 3-24.

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Economic effects

Changing form of urbanization

Planning for urbanization

Examples

References

See also