PROCESS OF

URBANIZATION
 URBANIZATION AND RURAL FLIGHT
Urbanization is the process of a population shift from rural areas
to cities. During the last century, global populations have urbanized
rapidly:

• 13% of people lived in urban environments in the year 1900

• 29% of people lived in urban environments in the year 1950

One projection suggests that, by 2030, the proportion of people

living in cities may reach 60%.
Urbanization tends to correlate positively with industrialization. With
the promise of greater employment opportunities that come from
industrialization, people from rural areas will go to cities in pursuit of
greater economic rewards.
 Another term for urbanization is “rural flight. ” In modern times,
this flight often occurs in a region following the industrialization of
agriculture—when fewer people are needed to bring the same amount
of agricultural output to market—and related agricultural services
and industries are consolidated.

These factors negatively affect the economy of small- and middle-

sized farms and strongly reduce the size of the rural labor market.
Rural flight is exacerbated when the population decline leads to the
loss of rural services (such as business enterprises and schools), which
leads to greater loss of population as people leave to seek those
features.
 As more and more people leave villages and farms to live in cities,
urban growth results. The rapid growth of cities like Chicago in the
late nineteenth century and Mumbai a century later can be attributed
largely to rural-urban migration. This kind of growth is especially
commonplace in developing countries.

Urbanization occurs naturally from individual and corporate

efforts to reduce time and expense in commuting, while improving
opportunities for jobs, education, housing, entertainment, and
transportation. Living in cities permits individuals and families to
take advantage of the opportunities of proximity, diversity, and
marketplace competition. Due to their high populations, urban areas
can also have more diverse social communities than rural areas,
allowing others to find people like them.
 Economic and Environmental Effects of
Urbanization
Urbanization has significant economic and
environmental effects on cities and surrounding areas. As
city populations grow, they increase the demand for goods
and services of all kinds, pushing up prices of these goods
and services, as well as the price of land.
As land prices rise, the local working class may be priced
out of the real estate market and pushed into less desirable
neighborhoods – a process known as gentrification.
 Growing cities also alter the environment. For example,
urbanization can create urban “heat islands,” which are
formed when industrial and urban areas replace and reduce
the amount of land covered by vegetation or open soil.
In rural areas, the ground helps regulate temperatures by
using a large part of the incoming solar energy to evaporate
water in vegetation and soil. This evaporation, in turn, has a
cooling effect.
 However in cities, where less vegetation and exposed
soil exists, the majority of the sun’s energy is absorbed by
urban structures and asphalt. During the day, cities
experience higher surface temperatures because urban
surfaces produce less evaporative cooling.
Additional city heat is given off by vehicles and
factories, as well as industrial and domestic heating and
cooling units. Together, these effects can raise city
temperatures by 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1 to 6
degrees Celsius).
 Suburbanization and
Counterurbanization

Recently in developed countries, sociologists have

observed suburbanization and counterurbanization, or
movement away from cities. These patterns may be driven
by transportation infrastructure, or social factors like
racism.
 In developed countries, people are able to move out of
cities while still maintaining many of the advantages of city
life (for instance, improved communications and means of
transportation).
In fact, counterurbanization appears most common
among the middle and upper classes who can afford to buy
their own homes.
 Race also plays a role in American suburbanization. During
World War I, the massive migration of African Americans from the
South resulted in an even greater residential shift toward suburban
areas.

The cities became seen as dangerous, crime-infested areas, while

the suburbs were seen as safe places to live and raise a family,
leading to a social trend known in some parts of the world as
“white flight. ”
 Some social scientists suggest that the historical processes of
suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white
privilege that have contributed to contemporary patterns of
environmental racism.

In the United States, suburbanization began in earnest after

World War II, when soldiers returned from war and received
generous government support to finance new homes. Suburbs,
which are residential areas on the outskirts of a city, were less
crowded and had a lower cost of living than cities.
 Suburbs grew dramatically in the 1950s when the U.S. interstate
highway system was built, and automobiles became affordable for
middle class families. Around 1990, another trend emerged known
as counterurbanization, or “exurbanization”. The wealthiest
individuals began living in nice housing far in rural areas (as
opposed to forms).
 Suburbanization may be a new urban form.Rather than densely
populated centers, cities may become more spread out, composed
of many interconnected smaller towns. Interestingly, the modern
U.S. experience has gone from a largely rural country, to a highly
urban country, to a country with significant suburban populations.
THE RURAL REBOUND
 During the 1970s and again in the 1990s, the rural population
rebounded in what appeared to be a reversal of urbanization.
The rural rebound refers to the movement away from cities to rural
and suburban areas. Urbanization tends to occur along with
modernization, yet in the most developed countries many cities are
now beginning to lose population. In the United States in the 1970s,
demographers observed that the rural population was actually growing
faster than urban populations, a phenomenon they labeled the “rural
rebound. ”
 This trend reversed in the 1980s, due in part to a recession
that hit farmers particularly hard. But again in the 1990s, rural
populations appeared to be gaining at the expense of cities.
Indeed, in the last 50 years, about 370 cities worldwide with more
than 100,000 residents have undergone population losses of more
than 10%, and more than 25% of the depopulating cities are in
the United States.
 Rather than moving to rural areas, most participants in the so-
called the rural rebound migrated into new, rapidly growing
suburbs.
The rural rebound, then, may be more evidence of the
importance of suburbanization as a new urban form in the most
developed countries.
SUBURBANIZATION
THE RURAL REBOUND
 Suburbanization is a general term that refers to the movement of
people from cities to surrounding areas. However, the
suburbanization that took place after 1970 was different from the
suburbanization that had occurred earlier, after World War II.
In this more recent wave of suburbanization, people moved
beyond the nearby suburbs to farther-away towns. Sociologists
have invented several new categories to describe these new types
of suburban towns; two of the most notable are ex-urbs and edge
cities.
 The expression exurb (for “extra-urban”) refers to a ring of
prosperous communities beyond a city’s suburbs. Often, these
communities are commuter towns or bedroom communities.
Commuter towns are primarily residential; most of the residents
commute to jobs in the city. They are sometimes called bedroom
communities because residents spend their days away in the cities
and only come home to sleep.
In general, commuter towns have little commercial or industrial
activity of their own, though they may contain some retail centers
to serve the daily needs of residents. Although most exurbs are
commuter towns, most commuter towns are not exurban.
 Exurbs vary in wealth and education level. In the United States,
exurban areas typically have much higher college education levels
than closer-in suburbs, though this is not necessarily the case in
other countries. They typically have average incomes much higher
than nearby rural counties, reflecting the urban wages of their
residents.
 Although some exurbs are quite wealthy even compared to
nearer suburbs or the city itself, others have higher poverty levels
than suburbs nearer the city. This may happen especially where
commuter towns form because workers in a region cannot afford to
live where they work and must seek residency in another town with
a lower cost of living.
For example, during the “dot com” bubble of the late twentieth
century, housing prices in California cities skyrocketed, spawning
exurban growth in adjacent counties.
WHITE FLIGHT
 Sociologists have posited many explanations for
counterurbanization, but one of the most debated is whether
suburbanization is driven by white flight.
The term white flight was coined in the mid-twentieth
century to describe suburbanization and the large-scale
migration of whites of various European ancestries, from
racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous
suburban regions.
 During the first half of the twentieth century,
discriminatory housing policies often prevented blacks from
moving to suburbs; banks and federal policy made it difficult
for blacks to get the mortgages they needed to buy houses,
and communities used restrictive housing covenants to
exclude minorities.
 White flight during this period contributed to urban decay,
a process whereby a city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair
and decrepitude. Symptoms of urban decay include
depopulation, abandoned buildings, high unemployment,
crime, and a desolate, inhospitable landscape.
 White flight contributed to the draining of cities’ tax bases
when middle-class people left, exacerbating urban decay
caused in part by the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs
as they moved into rural areas or overseas where labor was
cheaper.
 More recently, the concept has been extended to newer forms of
suburbanization, including migration from urban to rural areas and to
exurbs. In a similar vein, some demographers have described the rural
rebound, and the newest waves of suburbanization, as a form of
ethnic balkanization, in which different ethnic groups (not only
whites) sort themselves into racially homogeneous communities.

These phenomena, however, are not so clearly driven by the

restrictive policies, laws, and practices that drove the white flight of
the first half of the century.