Levels, Patterns and Trends of Urbanization (World)

1. What is Urbanization?
2. Levels of Urbanization in the World
3. Patterns of Urbanization in the World : Demographic Changes, Economic Development, Consumption Pattern, Urban Footprint.
4. Patterns of Urbanization in Asia.
5. Trends of Urbanization in the World : Past, Recent and Future Trends.
6. Timeline of Urbanization in the World (1950- 2050)
7. Projected Urban and Rural Population.
8. Urbanization and Sustainability.

1. LEVELS, PATTERNS AND TRENDS OF URBANISATION IN THE WORLD Chandra Lasya Sri Lakshmi Shreemoyee

2. INTRODUCTION Urbanization : Urbanization refers to the concentration of population at a center. It may be defined in a crude form as the proportion of population residing in urban centers and in a sophisticated way, refers to, the proportion of population engaged in secondary sector of economy in an urban place. Demographically , it is an increase in the urban population. But there is a distinction between an increase or growth in urban population and the urbanization. In case, where the rate of increase in the urban population exceeds the rate of increase of total regional population especially by a considerable margin, that condition is called urbanization. So long as there is an increase in this proportion of urban population to the total population, there is urbanization.

3. World Urbanisation began with the Industrial Revolution in Britain. There was a huge growth in the population during the Industrial Revolution. This lead to the rise in the construction of buildings, factories and city workers.  Many places got over-crowded and residents had to move into the city because of this and due to the increase in this growth rate, urbanisation started. The below graph shows the population growth before & after Industrial Revolution:

4. LEVELS

5. LEVELS OF URBANISATION : According to World Urbanisation Prospects(2018), more people live in urban areas than in rural areas globally i.e. 55 % of the world’s population reside in urban areas in 2018. Since 1950, urban population has increased from 751 million to 4.2billion in 2018. In 1950, 30 % of the world’s population was urban, and by 2050, 68 % of the world’s population is projected to be urban. Growth in the urban population is driven by overall population increase and by the upward shift in the percentage living in urban areas. Together, these two factors are projected to add 2.5 billion to the world’s urban population by 2050, with almost 90 % of this growth happening in Asia and Africa.

6. Today, the most urbanized regions are Northern America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Oceania. The less urbanised regions include Asia and then Africa. Percentage of population residing in urban areas in the above regions (2018): North America – 82 % Latin America & the Caribbean – 81 % Europe – 74 % Oceania – 68% Asia – 50 % Africa – 43 %

7. REGIONWISE PERCENTAGE OF URBAN POPULATION

8. Asia, despite being less urbanized than most other regions today, is home to 54 % of the world’s urban population, followed by Europe and Africa (13 % each). India, China and Nigeria – together are expected to account for 35 % of the growth in the world’s urban population between 2018 and 2050. Population Projection(Urban) of the above 3 countries by 2050: India – 416 million China – 255 million Nigeria – 189 million Close to half of the world’s urban dwellers reside in settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, while around one in eight live in 33 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants. By 2030, the world is projected to have 43 megacities, most of them in developing regions.

9. Largest Urban Agglomerations in the World:   Country Urban population 1 Tokyo 37 million 2 Delhi 29 million 3 Shanghai 26 million 4 Mexico 22 million 5 Sao Paulo 22 million Today, Cairo, Mumbai, Beijing and Dhaka all have close to 20 million inhabitants.

10. PATTERNS

11. PATTERNS IN THE PROCESS OF URBANIZATION ACROSS THE WORLD Urbanization is not only about a simple increase in the number of urban residents, but also involves a series change from rural to urban styles in terms of industry structure, employment, living conditions, and social public services. Three dimensions: industrialization, urbanization, and globalization have close relations with each other. In general economic growth promotes the expansion of modern industries and an increase in the urban population. World urbanization is changing quickly and the rate of change has been increasing since the last three decades.

12. World has entered an urban age, and an urbanization level of 50% has already been reached by the most rapidly developing country, China. The focus of world urbanization has shifted from the developed countries to the developing world. The crude statistic that the world is now more urban than rural, and that we are heading towards the 70% threshold by 2050.   The impacts of these regional differences in the Urban Age is due to demographic, economic and environmental patterns which is further linked to global urbanization and urban change.

13. DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES Growth in the mature cities of Europe and North America accelerated in the 19 th  century, most reached their peak by mid-20 th century. Tokyo grew by more than half a million inhabitants each year between 1950 and 1990, Mexico City and São Paulo by more than 300,000, and Mumbai by around 240,000. The only exceptions in this period were cities in China and Sub-Saharan Africa, which experienced only modest growth. But from the 1990s onwards – with the impact of globalization and opening up of the Chinese economy – cities continued to grow rapidly in south and south-east Asia, with China experiencing a sustained growth spurt that is palpable today. The result of this process of growth and change is an uneven distribution of urbanization across the globe.

14. Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision. Stark differences in patterns of urban growth across the globe

15. URBAN POPULATION : SIZE Most large cities of Europe and parts of North America hit their current size by 1950. Latin America, the west coast of the USA, Japan and some Asian cities grew substantially in the years leading to 1990. But the bulk of urban growth will be experienced in Sub-Saharan Africa, India and China and other Asian cities like Dhaka and Manila, while Tokyo will experience relatively modest growth over the same period.

16. The number of people that are likely to be added to some of the world’s largest cities through a combination of natural internal growth and migration show that projected growth rates of African and Indian cities stand out. While Indian cities like Delhi and Mumbai are adding 79 and 51 people/hour respectively,  Latin American cities like Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro slowing to 22, 18 and 10 respectively. Interestingly, Hong Kong’s highly controlled and efficient planning regime leads to a relatively low projection of 4 people/hour.

17. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Analyzing patterns of economic development in cities across the globe reveals equally striking regional differences. Using data on the economic performance of 700 cities with more than 500,000 people over the next 15 years (based on data from UN DESA), it appears that larger cities tend to perform disproportionately well.  In 2012, large cities made up 33% of the world’s global population, but produced more than 55% of all global economic output.

18. Future patterns of economic output and growth for the same 700 cities show that dramatic regional differences will still persist in GDP per capita in 2030 between the global north and global south – with important exceptions in the Middle East, China and parts of Latin America and Oceania, with the most intense growth in average GDP concentrated in China and East Asia.  There is evidence that urbanization contributes to wealth creation, especially in cities in developing countries, it is likely that the economic gulf between rich and poor is likely to persist.

19. CONSUMPTION PATTERN Where people live and how much they consume are inextricably linked.  People living in the highly concentrated urbanized regions of eastern China and the Ganges Valley in India have modest consumption patterns compared to the oil and petrol-guzzling habits of those in the more sparsely populated regions of North America and the Middle East, where people have much higher income levels. There are equally varied patterns between the established urban areas of Europe and the US, and the more widely scattered but dense cities of Latin America and Africa. All these show global disparities in wealth, lifestyles and consumption. For Example: A person living in the United Arab Emirates is likely to use 40 times more energy than a Bangladeshi, while a UK citizen consumes less than half of his US counterpart, but twice as much as a typical Mexican.

20. URBAN FOOTPRINT In Europe, there is a more decentralized form of urbanization that reflects the culture, history and geography of the region – and the fact that Europe urbanized early at a time when transport costs were significantly higher. Even though 73% of Europeans live in urban areas – the most urbanized of the four global regions – the urbanization density threshold is low, meaning urban residents occupy only 3% of the total land area of the geographic region. Sub-Saharan Africa of the four regions is experiencing a period of intense demographic growth. 37% of the population lives in urban areas today which means urbanization levels are below than that of the other global regions. Over half of China’s population (54%) live in urban areas, which represent just 2% of the total geographic footprint of the nation. Urbanization levels are approximately two-thirds that of Europe.

21. URBANIZATION PATTERNS IN ASIA In Asia urban-rural dichotomy is sharp. The primate pattern in Asia is partly the result of colonial legacy and partly due to sectorally oriented national development policies. The failure of the cities to diffuse is attributed to the overall low level of development and the very structure of the wider economic system. The patterns in the process of urbanization is associated with low income, poor nutrition, low levels of food consumption and low levels of education characteristics, not just for Asian countries but all developing countries.

22. The crucial factor is the overall and continuing rapid growth of rural population and city population. Unconformity between the urban and rural population growth, and the imbalanced economic development and social transformation have been labeled as “pseudo urbanization” or “dysfunctional urbanization”. In between the western and Asian patterns of urbanization, Japan illustrates a case of blending of megalopolitanism of the Western type with the typical village rooted rural way of life. India is a typical case of dual and transitional patterns with a highly polarized and spatially imbalanced urban system.

23. Urbanization is an essential element in the process of economic growth and social change in south and south-east Asia in the transformation of rural, agricultural economies into industrial economies. Given the poverty of Asian countries, the problems of urbanization become acute not only because of urban population size but also of the inability of these economies to provide the optimum standards of economic and social overhead. The striking feature of urbanization in the Asian countries are : Most of them are undergoing urbanization under conditions of rapid and accelerating rates of population growth The comparatively low proportion of urban population in most of the countries conceals the enormity of the problems of urbanization. All these factors bring about an increasing gap between the desirable pattern of urbanization and the observed pattern of urbanization .

24. SOURCE: World Urbanization Prospects 2014

25. TRENDS

26. HOW URBANIZATION DEVELOPED ? More than half of the world's population now live in urban areas — increasingly in highly-dense cities. However, urban settings are a relatively new phenomenon in human history. In 1950, it was predominantly high-income countries across Europe, the Americas, Australasia and Japan who were largely urban. The share of the global population living in urban areas has increased from one third in 1960 to 47% (2.8 billion people) in 1999. The world’s urban population is now growing by 60 million persons per year, about three times the increase in the rural population. A century later — in 2050 — it's projected that most countries will have more people living in urban areas than not.

27. LONG TERM TRENDS As we see, urban living is a very recent development. For most of our history humans lived in low-density, rural settings. Prior to 1600, it's estimated that the share of the world population living in urban settings did not reach 5 percent. By 1800, this share reached 7 percent; and by 1900 had increased to 16 percent. It was not until the 20th century that urbanization across the world began to increase rapidly.

28. OVER 500 YEARS Urbanization has largely been confined to the past 200 years. By 1800, still over 90 percent of the global (and country-level) population lived in rural areas. Urbanization increased at a rapid rate in The United States. However, that rate was outpaced by Japan. China’s started growing rapidly after the 1990s. Whereas, India’s rate of urbanization has been quite steady (33%).

29. RECENT TRENDS IN URBANIZATION The rate of urbanization varies for different countries. For the highly developed and higher income countries, they already had large urban populations. So the growth was rather slow.( US, Europe, Australasia ) But, for middle to low income countries, this is a more recent phenomenon. Urbanization started growing rapidly since the last 50 years. ( Nepal, Nigeria ) Today the majority of countries have more people living in urban areas than in rural. Countries with lower rates tend to be focused across Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia-Pacific, and a handful in Latin America.

30. How many people in total live in urban and rural areas?  In 1960 there were twice as many people in the world living in rural settings (2 billion) versus urban (1 billion).  With time, the gap decreased due to rapid growth in urban areas. In 2007 ,the rural and urban populations, were almost equal in size. After crossing the mark, now urban population grows more rapidly, while, rural population increases marginally. Asia and Africa remain the least urbanized of the developing regions (less than 38% each). Latin America and the Caribbean is more than 75% urban, a level almost equal to those in Europe, Northern America and Japan (all are between 75 and 79%).

31. 2007

32. FUTURE TRENDS IN URBANIZATION Across all countries urban shares are projected to increase in the coming decades, although at varied rates. By 2050, it's projected that 68 percent of the world's population will live in urban areas. In fact, by 2050 there are very few countries where rural shares are expected to be higher than urban. These include several across Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Pacific Island States, and Guyana in Latin America.

33. PROJECTED URBAN AND RURAL POPULATION As of 2018 we see that there is around 7.6 billion people in the world (4.2 billion in urban and 3.4 billion in rural areas). By 2050, global population is projected to increase to around 9.8 billion. It's estimated that more than twice as many people in the world will be living in urban (6.7 billion) than in rural settings (3.1 billion). The less-developed regions will be more than 57% urban. Latin America and the Caribbean will actually have a greater percentage of inhabitants living in cities than Europe will.

34. Why, when most countries are expected to be majority urban, does the global total just over two-thirds? 

35. CONCLUSION Urban areas play a more important role in national economies worldwide. The urbanization process in developing countries is occurring more dramatically and rapidly compared to that in developed countries. But the fact that developed nations have a higher level of urbanization than developing regions does not change. Some cities have experienced population decline in recent years. Most of these are located in the low-fertility countries of Asia and Europe. As the world continues to urbanize, sustainable development depends increasingly on the successful management of urban growth. Urban growth is closely related to the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental .

36. “Sustainable urbanization is key to successful development.”

37. REFERENCES United Nations (UN) Population Division's World Urbanization Prospects Chapter1-Concept of Urbanisation Evolution and Study Area Effects-World History from www.kellenj.weebly.com/effects.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4123908/ https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/23/cities-in-numbers-how-patterns-of-urban-growth-change-the-world#img-2 History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI)

38. THANK YOU