Urbanization: What Drives It, and What It Is Not

Two words that are not the same

Urbanization is an increase in the proportion of a population living in urban places. Urban growth is an increase in the number of people living in cities. A country can have rapid urban growth while its urbanization rate falls, if the rural population grows even faster. Exam items exploit this difference constantly.

Drivers

Agricultural surplus is the precondition: cities can only exist when farming feeds people who do not farm. Industrialization concentrated jobs in fixed locations. Rural-to-urban migration responds to push factors (mechanization of farming, land fragmentation, conflict, drought) and pull factors (wages, schooling, healthcare, perceived opportunity). Natural increase matters too: migrants are disproportionately of childbearing age, so cities keep growing even after in-migration slows.

Vocabulary the exam expects

Site is the physical character of a place — relief, water, soil. Situation is its position relative to other places — the reason a port or rail junction grows. Central business district (CBD): the commercial core, highest land values, lowest residential population. Suburbanization, driven by cars, highways, and mortgage policy, produced edge cities (office and retail nodes on the beltway), exurbs, and boomburbs. Counterurbanization is net movement from metropolitan to smaller settlements.

Megacity: over 10 million. Metacity: over 20 million. A world city (global city) is defined by command functions — finance, corporate headquarters, producer services — not by size. Metropolitan statistical area (MSA) bundles a core county with commuting-linked counties; a chain of merged metropolitan areas is a megalopolis.