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urbanisation — English
The process by which an increasing proportion of the total population of a country lives in cities and large towns. Although people have always under certain circumstances moved to live near neighbours and family, only 3% of the world population lived in urban areas in 1800. In 2000, nearly 50% of the people in the world were urbanised, and this percentage is predicted to rise to 60% by 2025. In the developed countries (see “developed countries”) roughly 50% of the population have been urbanised since about 1950, but since then the percentage has rapidly increased and even in the developing countries (see “developing countries”) about half of the population are now urbanised. A thousand years ago, security was perhaps the most important reason for moving to one of the cities which were walled and provided safety against enemy raids and bands of marauders. Since then economic reasons have become the most important reason for urbanisation. Mining, industrial development and manufacturing created employment and people leave the land to work in the cities where gainful employment could be found. Simultaneous with urbanisation has been the growth of large cities. While growth causes service provision, transport, accommodation, crime and all sorts of other problems in the cities, the rural areas experience problems because of shrinking population. Since the rural population is so small, service provision becomes uneconomical and people have to commute to the cities to find medical, educational, professional, commercial and other services. Too few people to work the land results in decreasing food production in the developing countries. In the industrialised developed countries, agricultural production does not decrease because mechanical implements replace the farm labourers. Urbanisation causes diverse problems for both the urban and the rural areas, but those are the problems the world now has to face because large cities and depopulated rural areas have come to stay.
