Social Studies 11, Lesson 4, Urbanization

As we already learned, the population grew wildly in the last 200 years from about 1 billion to about 8!!?

People moved to cities even faster than the population grew.

Keep in mind that at one time, people needed to spend most of their work finding. Harvesting or growing food. So 100% of people used to live in villages.

In 1900, when the population was 1.6 billion, 14% of those lived in cities.

Now in 2020, the world is 7.8 Billion people and 55% live in cities. Here are some different countries compared to the world average:

As you can see some places are highly urbanized (in fact if you take places like Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands or Singapore, they are basically 100% urban).

The least urbanized places are little island nations and places in Africa for the most part. Burundi and Papua New Guinea are the least urbanized places in the world at 13% urban, 87% rural. These kinds of places mostly survive on farming, fishing and gathering and usually are the least developed on Earth. (Development was what we talked about last week).

Why Cities?

Many people move to cities for work, indeed most work (before computers especially) is centred there. There are three main factors that have lead to the growth of cities.

Industrialization

For the past 240 years things like trains, trucks and factories have appeared and this meant the work was in central places like cities. Factories can’t usually function in small towns. They need large numbers of people and things like roads and large amounts of energy.

Mechanization

A HUGE factor in declining number of jobs in the last is machines doing work. At one time, almost every person was needed to harvest food in the summer. Now enormous farms have most of the work done by machines. This is also true of logging, mining, fishing and the manufacture of goods from clothing to canned food. Maybe the most recent jobs that were automated were self check-outs (including online shopping) which led to huge job losses and the next might be self-driving cars, trucking and taxi.

Technology

At one time, energy for cooking or making things came from mostly wood or coal. Now energy can be easily moved long distances and so you don’t need to live near a forest of coal mine.

Problems in Cities

Shanty Towns/ Slums

When a poor farmer or laborer moves to the city they often have basically nothing. It can be so they can work, get healthcare or have a child go to school. For this reason, huge squatters communities or Shanty towns (there used to be several of these in Vancouver). These areas rarely have clean water, amenities or sewage systems. In many parts of Africa children travel 10km to get water every day.

Orangi Town in Karachi, Pakistan might have 2.4 million residents, the same as Vancouver. Neza in Mexico City, Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya; Dharavi in Mumbai, India and Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa are all huge and desperately poor.

They exist in most cities and the Downtown Eastside is one of the poorest and most troubled in Canada. Their rate of Hep-C is

70% among the poor of that place. One 2013 study states 95% have a substance addiction and 74% have a mental illness. The causes are complex, but research indicates a majority have severe childhood trauma including abuse, extreme poverty and violence and come from families with that have layers of serious difficulties.

Street Children

Because some countries have 50% of the populations that are children or teens, some cities have huge numbers of street kids and life for them is very difficult. Usually these children are abandoned, exploited and face every kind of long-term problem.

How Cities are Organized

There are big differences in how cities are organized. It is based on when they developed, how quickly and whether they were planned (which has a lot to do with the wealth of the city).

The main types are: Political or Religious City; other Planned Cities, Organic City, Automobile City and Transit City.

Vancouver is like which one(s)?

Vancouver

Vancouver is defined by:

Site: Close the Pacific Ocean, deep water for harbours, lots of fresh water a major river. Travel East is more restricted by mountains almost everywhere else.

Situation: Near major US cities. One of the only ports on the West Coast. A gateway to lots Tourism destinations. Immigrants tend to come from Asia pacific.

Age: Vancouver became a town in 1887. It’s extremely young. Places like Damascus, Syria; Athens, Greece or Jericho, Palastine are thousands of years old and have been lived in all that time. The ‘lost cities’ of Macchu Picchu and Ankor Wat aren’t as old as many buildings in Rome.

Look at these photos of the incredible scale of Hong Kong’s: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2306842/Stunning-images-Hong-Kong-living-cubicles-look-just-like-Borg-cubes.html

Here are a bunch of diagrams showing the world and how and where people live in cities: https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization

This is Tokyo, one of the world’s most populous and densest cities. You can see the shops aren’t just at

street level, but go up every building.

Here is Dubai, UAE, Now and in the 1960s.

Cities can change very fast if there’s money.

Here is the last word. Animals like cities too, just not humans: https://www.facebook.com/1477522595908545/videos/891382984667773/