A Brief History (& Future) of Urbanization
Things They Forgot to Tell Me in Business School

​Introduction: Urbanization is the process of people moving from the countryside into towns and cities. This is the gist, although reasonable people can, and do, argue endlessly over definitions and detail.

Urbanization is most often used in relation to the total population, commonly to describe both a state in time and a measure of progress. So, the question “What is the urbanization rate in China?” can well be answered “In 2019, the urbanization rate in China was 60%” (meaning that 60% of the population lived in cities and towns), but can also be answered, “In 2019, the urbanization rate in China was 2.3%” (meaning that cities are growing in population by 2.3% per year).

Old Habit, New Importance: Throughout history, cities and towns have always played critical roles as centers of trade, culture and power, but for most of this time they just haven’t held that many people as societies remained overwhelmingly agrarian. Only from the advent of the industrial age in the 19th century, with widespread economic growth, improved nutrition, better hygiene, and advances in healthcare and modern medicines, did the share of the total population living in cities and towns began to increase notably.










 





An Urban Future: It took two hundred years of rapid urban growth for global urbanization to reach 50% in 2007, meaning that for the first time in history more than one-half of the world’s population is living in urban areas. While purely symbolic, like crossing the equator or the international date line, this momentous non-event caused a stir and helped people focus on the challenges of managing rapid urban growth. Forecasts say that the level of urbanization in the world will reach 68% by 2050 (United Nations). And it is not just the absolute growth of cities that poses challenges, with millions of people pouring into cities around the world every week, but also the overwhelming share of total growth that occurs in these highly concentrated areas.  

The global population growth rate has been in steady decline for the last fifty years, halving from 2.2% in 1970 to 1.1% in 2020 (United Nations), leaving the total population of the world still expanding, but slowly. Within this overall slow-growth climate, however, cities and towns are still growing quickly, now accounting for about 95% of all population growth. Across the world, rural populations are stagnant or in decline. 















Nowhere is this concentration of growth in cities more pronounced and impactful than in China, where its 1.4 billion people have been undergoing an unprecedented demographic shift for decades, with the rural population not just falling behind relatively, but declining absolutely by one third since 1990 (-275,000,000), while the urban population nearly trebled (+540,000,000).











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Urbanization is not spread equally across the world with rates in countries varying from 30-80% in most instances. Economic wealth and levels of urbanization are positively correlated, but the causality and interrelationship between the two is complex, less a chicken or egg question than a chicken and egg question. 










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Not surprisingly, with 95% of population growth happening in cities and towns, and about 4.3 billion urbanites, the size and proliferation of cities large and small has grown accordingly. The number of cities in the world with populations over 1 million jumped from 76 in 1950 to 579 in 2020. Over 900 million people live in huge cities of over 5 million residents, a further 1 billion in cities with populations from 1-5 million. While these are staggering numbers, the majority of the world’s urban dwellers reside still in ‘smaller’ centers of under 1 million, with 1.8 billion in cities < 300,000, and 700 million in cities 300,000-1 million. 






















So, that is A Brief History (and Future) of Urbanization at the global scale, painted with a big brush but using the best available data. People continue to flood into towns that grow into cities, and into cities that grow into bigger cities. There is, of course, a world of nuance beneath the headlines and if you have a geeky interest in the data, the best collections are provided by the United Nations (Population Division) and World Bank Group, using their own and national government resources as primary sources. Additional resources like www.ourworldindata.org and www.prb.org also have excellent collections of processed data about cities and the people inhabiting them.
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​G. Batzel2021
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