Question

Explain the process of urbanization, U.S. urban patterns, and rural rebound.

Answer 1

• Urbanization is “the process by which an increasing proportion of a population lives in cities and has a growing influence on the culture”. The city offers more variety like music, shops, food, and culture versus what the suburbs offer.
• 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.
• U.S. Urban Patterns-The U.S. Census Bureau classifies areas as urban or rural based on population size and density.Different international, national, and local agencies may define “urban” in various ways. For example, city governments often use political boundaries to delineate what counts as a city.
• Other agencies may define “urban” based on land use: places count as urban if they are built up with residential neighborhoods, industrial sites, railroad yards, cemeteries, airports, golf courses, and similar areas. Using this sort of definition, in 1997, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tallied over 98,000,000 acres of “urban” land.
• 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.
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