Urbanization tipped Earth from rural to city-majority living
Urbanization names the process by which settlements swell as more people live and work in cities, stressing the rising urban share of national populations. Mid-century forecasts expected vast majorities in both poorer and richer countries to be city-dwellers by mid-twenty-first century. Industrial Britain finally broke the old farm–town equilibrium.
Demographers measure this shift as a ratio, not a head count: what matters is the proportion of a country's people living in places classified as urban. For thousands of years that ratio barely moved. From the first cities of the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and Egypt until the 1700s, stagnant farming kept most people on the land, while towns stayed small hubs of market trade and craft work, though the urban share did climb noticeably during the first millennium BCE.
England shows how fast the balance flipped. Residents of cities above 20,000 people made up 17% of England and Wales in 1801 and 54% by 1891. Measured more broadly, England and Wales were 72% urban in 1891, while the United States managed 28%, France 37% and Prussia 41%. Farmhands freed by more productive agriculture poured into Manchester and Birmingham, imported North American grain and refrigerated meat from Australasia and South America fed them, and public transport let workers commute from farther out.
Around 1900 only 15% of humanity lived in cities. The spread reached the developing world from the 1950s, and in 2007, according to the UN, city dwellers became a majority for the first time. Force can speed the process: China, where land seizures are aggressive, had urbanized to 54% when India stood at 36%, partly because Indian peasants organized armed resistance. Such involuntary migration tends to feed rapid slum growth.
Cities concentrate jobs, specialist medicine, schooling and paid work for women, which can lower fertility. The costs are real too. In Thailand, farmers fleeing work described as "hot and exhausting" traded carbohydrate diets for fatty, sugary food and saw obesity climb, while floods in Bangkok in 2011 and Jakarta in 2007 showed that slums offer no shelter from disaster. Roughly 3 billion more people are expected in cities by 2050, most of them in Africa and Asia.
Source: Urbanization
