What will make a young man who has just completed higher education to migrate from the rural set up to an urban one? This movement of inhabitancy from one geographical area to another either on temporary or permanent basis is caused by different factors that are either personal or occupational among others. Soon after independence, the third world states migration from rural areas to urban centers has been on the increase citing difference in economic opportunities and natural conditions, for example, the climate, soils or relief. Thus people migrate as their response to this. The high and better level of lifestyle in urban areas could attract inhabitants to relocate (Davis 9). It resonates that natural disasters like floods, famines, and drought mostly affect the countryside which results in populations moving into urban centers. In unstable regions where there is insecurity as a consequence of a political instability of the world, habitats will seek security in urban areas. Lack of social amenities such as running water, electricity, health care and schools are among the many factors that contribute to population moving to cities.
Migration has significant advantages. First, it reduces the pressure of inhabitancy on arable agricultural land at the source. It supplies a good source of labor to the receiving regions and ensures a continuation of the flow of capital. Further, it reduces pressure of the few amenities found in the rural areas; creates a good customer base of products and services and promotes cultural integration. On the other hand, such an influx into the receiving regions has their limitations. An increase in gangs and crime; an increase of pressure of amenities, leads to high cost of living, congestion in housing and transportation, a decline in yield from the rural areas due to lack of enough manpower to do farming and leads to cultural disintegration.
In some years, the urban population will surpass the rural population. When inhabitancy moves to urban centers, it is mandatory that they obtain white collar jobs, or live on the high end of the cities, majority will be in slums (Davis 12). However, what makes the difference is that they are near what the urban centers have to offer. It was similar case in the last phase of the Stone Age which had a development of agriculture, domestication of animals and manufacture of textiles and pottery in the Middle East between 9000 and 8000 BC. The culmination of these was during the mid 18th century where changes in financial and social organizations were experienced in England and later in other countries. This was characterized mainly by replacement of hand tools with power-driven machines. These gains created more opportunities as the rise of metropolitan centers and demand for goods and services were increasing. With the coming of the steam engines, migration from rural to urban centers was easier and faster. Before independence of the current third world countries, the projected population of those countries was not known, with projections that were made by the colonial masters, the population shot up unexpectedly over the real transition has already occurred (Davis 14).
The Malthusian report of 1972 by the Club of Rome became rather insignificant as the globe urbanized faster as earlier predicted. In the mid 20th century there was a total of 86 cities with an urban population of a million inhabitants. At the beginning of the new century there were 400 cities and by 2015 550 cities with a population of approximately 3.2 billion inhabitants. From 1950 the world has seen nearly two-thirds of the global explosion and looking at a million migrants and babies every week. As more cities rise, the world rural population is on the decrease as of 2020, and thirty years later cities will account for all population growth reaching a staggering 10 billion persons. The demographic future belongs to megacities Shanghai, Dhaka, and Mumbai. As the world population stabilizes somewhere between nine and ten billion, the megacities will continue in their unavoidable expansion as the rural poor move into urban centers to become urban poor; despite the daunting problems of overcrowding, pollution,crumbling infrastructure, they will consider themselves better off than if they were in rural areas. Combined urban populations of Brazil, India and China almost equate that of North America and Europe. The speed at which the third world is urbanizing is high compared to immediate post-colonial years compared to the era when Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 until her death in 1901.It saw an extended period of peace, refined sensibilities, prosperity and national self-confidence for Britain.
London by 1910 was seven times larger than in 1800; however Kinshasa, Dhaka, and Lagos are forty times larger today. The new megacities more a population of 8 million and counting has brought a lot of excitement more the hyper cities which has more than 20 million inhabitants at the time which was total world population during the French Revolution of 1789.According to the UN population division, Mexico City, New York and Seoul have passed this figure with Tokyo topping the list.Shanghai has for decades experienced stagnated growth owing to the Maoist policies of under urbanization whereas other cities in the far east such as Karachi and Dhaka have heard an upscale growth and by 2025, these cities will be a total population of almost 50 million.
However if the megacities are the end of the light in the urban tunnels, nearly three-quarters of the burden of the population growth will be borne by somewhat second tier cities and smaller peripheral urban areas. There is little to no control of the mass exodus of people into the urban centers that which then creates the problem of lack of planning to accommodate these people or even provide them with the necessary amenities such as water, proper drainage systems or housing. By 1997 43% percent of the population are in urban areas; this is as a result of the numbers of cities soaring from 193 to 640 since 1978.Lagos has experienced a spectacular growth with a population of 30000 in pre-independence 1950 to 10 million today; other cities such as Ouagadougou, Nouakchott and Bamako have followed the same trend. Latin America has not been left behind where primary cities for a long time have monopolized growth, secondary cities such as Temuco, Curitiba, and Salvador are quickly rising with a current population of 100000 to 500000.Indonesia has adopted the process of rural/urban hybridization where land policies were introduced to create proper land use in urban areas.
There is speculation by the urbanists to put up a process of weaving together all third world cities into incredible new networks, hierarchies, and corridors. For instance the Yangtze River and Pearl River in China along with the Beijing-Tianjin corridor and developing into urban-industrial megalopolises at a very high rate compared to the New York –Philadelphia corridor. It may be the precursor of the other main continuous corridors starting with Japan to Korea to West Java to Shanghai which will eventually join Tokyo, New York, and London as one of the world cities having full control of the global web of capital and information flow.
The greatest industrial revolution in the history of China was the Archimedean lever shifting a population of almost the size of Europe from rural villages to the smog filled high rising cities; this will eventually make China cease being a rural country as it has been for thousands of years. The dynamics which the third world has seen regarding urbanization have surpassed the gains made by Europe in the 1800s and 1900s.
The rather uncontrolled urban boom totally contradicts the orthodox economic models which made predictions that the negative feedback of urban stagnation might slow or reverse migration from the rural villages. However in Africa, the opposite happened. With economies like Dar Es Salaam contracting from 2 to 5%, could still sustain a growth of 5 to 8%.This was made possible by enforcing policies of Agriculture deregulation and de-peasantization speeding up the mass exodus of extra rural labor to urban slums even as opportunities in the cities were dwindling. Kinshasa, Khartoum, and Lima have shown the same type of growth despite shrunken or non-functional public sectors, ruined import substitution industries and decreasing mobile middle classes (Cypher 317). Generally speaking, global forces causing the mass exodus are seen in the mechanization of Java and India, food imports in Kenya, Mexico and Haiti, drought famine and civil war in a few African countries.
The urban poor is the promotion of a rural poor. They occupy many of the city slums where they prefer the status quo to former. These informal housing sectors are inhabited by the most of the labors mostly in the informal sectors. This is a breeding ground of contagious and infectious diseases, a conducive breeding ground for gangs and crime, illegal businesses such as drugs and illicit liquor are the economic activities in these areas. However slums neglects important land use issue arising from hyper-urbanization and informal settlement.
Works Cited
Cypher, James M. The Process Of Economic Development. 2014. Print.
Davis, Mike. Planet Of Slums. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
