Write a note on urbanisation.
Answers
Explanation:
Urbanization is the movement of people from rural to urban areas, and the result is the growth of cities. It is also a process by which rural areas are transformed into urban areas. Urbanization is a process that has occurred, or is occurring, in nearly every part of the world that humans have inhabited. People move into cities to seek economic opportunities. Urbanization is measured by the percentage of people, who are urban in a society, a region or the world. Urbanization, therefore, summarizes the relationship between the total population and its urban component. That is, it is mostly used as a demographic indicator or in the demographic sense, whereby, there is an increase in the urban population to the total population over a period of time.The concept of urbanization has a dual meaning—demographically and sociologically. The demographic meaning refers to the increasing proportion of population in a country or a region that resides in cities. Sociologically, it refers to the behaviour, institutions and materialistic things that are identified as urban in origin and use. In other words, it is a social process which is the cause and consequence of a change in the man’s way of life in the urban milieu.
In the urban areas, one can find a range of features like the loss of primary relationship and increasing secondary group relationship, voluntary associations, plurality of norms and values, weaker social control, increasing secularization and segmentary roles—a greater division of labour, greater importance of the mass media and the tendency for the urbanites to treat each other instrumentally. Sociologists believe that all these are caused due to large number of population, which is heterogeneous, having come from various backgrounds.
Thus, the more denser, larger and heterogeneous the community the more accentuated are the characteristics associated with the urban way of life. Another aspect is that in the social world, institutions and practices may be accepted and continued for reasons other than those that originally brought them into existence and that accordingly the urban mode of life may be perpetuated under conditions quite foreign to those necessary for its origin.John Palen in demographic terms defines Urbanization as ‘an increase in population concentration; organizationally it is an alteration in structure and functions’.
Eldridege substantiates this view. According to him, urbanization involves two elements such as the multiplication of points of concentration and the increase in the size of individual concentration.
Thompson Warren in Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences states ‘Urbanization is the movement of people from communities concerned chiefly or solely with agriculture to other communities, generally large whose activities are primarily concerned with the government, trade, manufacture or allied interests’.
According to Anderson, ‘Urbanization is not a one-way process, but it is a two way process. It involves not only movement from villages to cities and change from agricultural occupation to business, trade, service and profession, but it involves change in the migrants’ attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior pattern.’ Thus, according to him, urbanization involves the following
i. Concentration of people at population densities higher than those associated with agricultural populations with only very rare exceptions on either side.
ii. Population shift (migration) from rural to urban areas.
iii. Occupational shift from agricultural to non-agricultural.
iv. Land-use shift from agricultural to non-agricultural.
Answer:
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Urbanization (or urbanisation) refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change.
Explanation:
short note=
Although the two concepts are sometimes used interchangeably, urbanization should be distinguished from urban growth. Whereas urbanization refers to the proportion of the total national population living in areas classified as urban, urban growth strictly refers to the absolute number of people living in those areas.[3] The United Nations has projected that half of the world's population will live in urban areas at the end of 2008.[4] It is predicted that by 2050 about 64% of the developing world and 86% of the developed world will be urbanized.[5] That is equivalent to approximately 3 billion urbanites by 2050, much of which will occur in Africa and Asia.[6] Notably, the United Nations has also recently projected that nearly all global population growth from 2017 to 2030 will be by cities, with about 1.1 billion new urbanites over the next 10 years.[7]
Urbanization is relevant to a range of disciplines, including urban planning, geography, sociology, architecture, economics, and public health. The phenomenon has been closely linked to modernization, industrialization, and the sociological process of rationalization.[8] Urbanization can be seen as a specific condition at a set time (e.g. the proportion of total population or area in cities or towns), or as an increase in that condition over time. Therefore, urbanization can be quantified either in terms of the level of urban development relative to the overall population, or as the rate at which the urban proportion of the population is increasing. Urbanization creates enormous social, economic and environmental changes, which provide an opportunity for sustainability with the "potential to use resources more efficiently, to create more sustainable land use and to protect the biodiversity of natural ecosystems."[6]
Urbanization is not merely a modern phenomenon, but a rapid and historic transformation of human social roots on a global scale, whereby predominantly rural culture is being rapidly replaced by predominantly urban culture. The first major change in settlement patterns was the accumulation of hunter-gatherers into villages many thousand years ago. Village culture is characterized by common bloodlines, intimate relationships, and communal behavior, whereas urban culture is characterized by distant bloodlines, unfamiliar relations, and competitive behavior. This unprecedented movement of people is forecast to continue and intensify during the next few decades, mushrooming cities to sizes unthinkable only a century ago. As a result, the world urban population growth curve has up till recently followed a quadratic-hyperbolic pattern.[9]
Today, in Asia the urban agglomerations of Osaka, Tokyo, Mumbai, Dhaka, Karachi, Jakarta, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Manila, Seoul, and Beijing are each already home to over 20 million people, while Delhi is forecast to approach or exceed 40 million people in the year 2035.[10] Cities such as Tehran, Istanbul, Mexico City, São Paulo, London, Moscow, New York City, Lagos, Los Angeles, and Cairo are, or soon will be, home to over 15 million people each.