Urbanization - Causes

Causes

Urbanisation occurs as individual, commercial, and governmental efforts to reduce time and expense in commuting and transportation while improving opportunities for jobs, education, housing, and transportation. Living in cities permits the advantages of the opportunities of proximity, diversity, and marketplace competition. However, the advantages of urbanisation are weighed against alienation issues, stress, increased daily life costs, and negative social aspects that result from mass marginalisation. Suburbanisation, which is happening in the cities of the largest developing countries, was sold and seen as an attempt to balance these negative aspects of urban life while still allowing access to the large extent of shared resources.

Cities are known to be places where money, services and wealth are centralised. Many rural inhabitants come to the city for reasons of seeking fortunes and social mobility. Businesses, which provide jobs and exchange capital are more concentrated in urban areas. Whether the source is trade or tourism, it is also through the ports or banking systems that foreign money flows into a country, commonly located in cities.

Economic opportunities are just one reason people move into cities, though they do not go to fully explain why urbanisation rates have exploded only recently in places like China and India. Rural flight is a contributing factor to urbanisation. In rural areas, often on small family farms or collective farms in villages, it has traditionally been difficult to access manufactured goods, though overall quality of life is very subjective, and may certainly surpass that of the city. Farm living has always been susceptible to unpredictable environmental conditions, and in times of drought, flood or pestilence, survival may become extremely problematic.

Thai farmers are seen as poor, stupid, and unhealthy. As young people flee the farms, the values and knowledge of rice farming and the countryside are fading, including the tradition of long kek, helping neighbors plant, harvest, or build a house. We are losing what we call Thai-ness, the values of being kind, helping each other, having mercy and gratefulness.— Iam Thongdee, Professor of Humanities, Mahidol University in Bangkok

In a New York Times article concerning the acute migration away from farming in Thailand, life as a farmer was described as "hot and exhausting." "Everyone says the farmer works the hardest but gets the least amount of money". In an effort to counter this impression, the Agriculture Department of Thailand is seeking to promote the impression that farming is “honorable and secure.”

However, in Thailand, urbanization has also resulted in massive increases in problems such as obesity. City life, especially in modern urban slums of the developing world, are certainly hardly immune to pestilence nor climatic disturbances such as floods, yet continue to strongly attract migrants. Examples of this were the 2011 Thailand floods and 2007 Jakarta flood. Urban areas are also far more prone to violence, drugs, and other urban social problems. In the case of the United States, industrialisation of agriculture has negatively affected the economy of small and middle-sized farms and strongly reduced the size of the rural labor market.

These are the costs of participating in the urban economy. Your increased income is canceled out by increased expenditure. In the end, you have even less left for food. —Madhura Swaminathan, economist at Kolkata’s Indian Statistical Institute

Particularly in the developing world, conflict over land rights due to the effects of globalisation has led to less political powerful groups, such as farmers, losing or forfeiting their land, resulting in obligatory migration into cities. In China, where land acquisition measures are forceful, there has been far more extensive and rapid urbanisation (51%) than in India (29%), where peasants form militant groups (e.g. Naxalites) to oppose such efforts. Obligatory and unplanned migration often results in rapid growth of slums. This is also similar to areas of violent conflict, where people are driven off their land due to violence. Bogota, Colombia is one example of this.

Cities offer a larger variety of services, such as specialist services that aren't found in rural areas. Supporting the provision of these services requires workers, resulting in more numerous and varied job opportunities. Elderly individuals may be forced to move to cities where there are doctors and hospitals that can cater for their health needs. Varied and high quality educational opportunities are another factor in urban migration, as well as the opportunity to join, develop, and seek out social communities.