Urbanisation: Concepts and Trends
“In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead." — The Indian billionaire real estate developer Kushal Pal Singh (born 1931).
Urbanisation is a historic and complex socioeconomic process radically transforming rural and urban settings and lifestyles, but “no international consensus on how to determine the boundaries of urban areas or identify when a settlement is ‘urban’” (McGranahan & Satterthwaite, 2014, p.7). This disagreement is reflected in the long-held assumption that Africa is the fastest-urbanising continent; McGranahan & Satterthwaite (2014) and Das & Paul (2021) believe it is Asia.
With more than 50% of the global population living in cities — a figure to rise from 65% to a peak projection of 85% by 2050 — rapid urbanisation presents significant socioeconomic and environmental challenges and opportunities, especially in developing countries where city population growth — “over-urbanisation” (Alam, 1987, p.243) — has been attributed to internal, rural-urban migration of the rural poor. The extreme weather events and changes forecast in the future will force many more to seek shelter and safety in cities.
This article will present an overview of the concepts and trends of urbanisation and the urban transformations already taking place to create "smart" and 15-minute living, breathing, and thinking cities with the design and implementation of technological and data-driven solutions.
Defining Urbanisation
Urbanisation is generally defined as a process of human movement from a rural to an urban setting (Tisdale, 1942; Anderson, 1959; Leeds, 1979; Antrop, 2004; Kuddus et al., 2020) affecting population and the built environment. However, the size and scale of cities — the human settlements commonly identified with urbanisation — means any definition exclusively covering population growth is inadequate to include the complex socioeconomic and behavioural factors “which commonly occur when cities grow” (Tilly, 1967, p.102).
With more than 50% of the global population living in cities (OECD & European Commission, 2020), their rapid transformation, notably with the rise of megacities, means the definition of urbanisation will change as human influence accelerates its encroachment on rural settings (Antrop, 2004; Peng et al., 2018). By 2050, an estimated 6.5 billion people will be living in urban areas (ODI, 2018; Mirzahossen & Mohghaddam, 2021, p.24) when the world’s population is projected to reach between 9 and 9.8 billion (Cohen, 2010; Hoornweg & Pope, 2016).
The emergence and growth of megacities — a population of more than 10 million (Bourdeau-Lepage & Huriot, 2007; Wojciechowska, 2022) — highlights the “megatrend” of urbanisation (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2022). This is due to prevailing rural-urban migration patterns, noticeably in China (Chen et al., 2018; Li et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023) and developing countries (Abdullah, 2016; Selod & Shilpi, 2021), by the pull factors of greater economic, educational, and social opportunities commonly associated with city life (Amrevurayire & Oje, 2016; Singh, 2017).*
Today, there are roughly 33 megacities worldwide, with the majority in Asia and South America (Konaev, 2019; Debnath et al., 2023); a significant rise since the beginning of the 1990s when there were only 10 (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2014). The growth of megacities, as measured by births and migration, is expected to continue, with 43 projected by 2030 (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2019; Khanh et al., 2023).*
The Causes of Urbanisation
The number of urbanised countries is increasing rapidly, with their economic development affected by population movement and growth. At the beginning of the twentieth century, roughly 15% of the global population lived in urban areas (Chamie, 2001; Zhang, 2016). In 1900, London was the world’s largest city with a population between 4.5 million (Porter, 1998, p.186) and 5 million (Satterthwaite, 2007, p.16). Rapid urbanisation occurred globally post World War II (1945), driven by economic expansion and industrialisation, creating major social transformations. The number of people living in cities reached 770 million in 1975 (Cohen & Kennedy, 2000). Today, the number is roughly 4 billion (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2018; Haynes, 2023) — “more than the world’s total population in 1975” (Satterthwaithe, 2020) — with the fastest rates of urban growth, in terms of population, occurring in the developing countries of Nigeria (Farrell, 2018) and Bangladesh (Hassan, 2017).
Urbanisation is influenced by multiple pull and push factors of rural-urban migration (Haq & Rehman, 1975; Alam, 1987; Jedwab et al., 2014; Lavuri, 2018), often resulting in rural depopulation. This internal movement accounts for urban growth in developing countries where large rural populations live in poverty. Still, the migration patterns in these countries are “heterogenous” (Selod & Shilpi, 2021, p.5), with significant numbers also moving between rural areas (rural-rural) in Cameroon, India, and Nicaragua (Cattaneo & Robinson, 2020). The rural-urban, urban-urban, and rural-rural movements highlight an unbalanced history of industrialisation and economic development across regions (Azzulin et al., 2022).
Social, economic, political, and ecological reasons for push factors of migration, resulting in permanent or temporary relocation in search of prosperity, include famine, unemployment, persecution, and violence. The impacts of climate change are a modern push factor for human migration to urban areas (Adger et al., 2020; Selod & Shilpi, 2021), but also cause unprecedented displacement. More extreme weather events and changes are forecast in the future. In Bangladesh, for example, the capital city and megacity of Dhaka experiences a population growth of up to 500,000 rural-urban migrants each year (Abdullah, 2016) escaping increased natural disasters (flooding and droughts) and poverty connected to climate change (Hassani-Mahmooei & Parris, 2012; Rana & Ilina, 2021).
Similarly, the frequency of extreme weather events in Mexico (Nawrotzki et al., 2017), countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Hassan & Tularam, 2018) and Pakistan (Saeed et al., 2016) has affected farming and agricultural production, the supply of natural resources, and employment opportunities, causing increased levels of internal migration to cities or informal urban settlements.
The disruption to livelihoods and rural economies attributed to climate change, particularly as agriculture is most vulnerable to extreme weather variations, will see push factors become the dominant force for internal movement in the future.
Pull factors are the attractions of an urban area (Lavuri, 2018) when rural opportunities and services are underfunded or scarce. While better housing and access to education are key drivers of migration — placing greater demand on urban networks — economic security, namely employment and higher wages, has been identified as the significant incentive for rural-urban relocation (Pearson, 1963; Liao & Yip, 2018; Halfacree, 2020). The consequences of this migration are felt in the agricultural sector by impacting production levels and lowering already precarious incomes.
Industrialisation has traditionally been linked to urbanisation (Bairoch & Goertz, 1986; Alam, 1987; Jedwab et al., 2013), with the expansion in services, manufacturing, and production creating economic growth and a skilled, organised workforce. This concentration has not only irrevocably changed social structures but also resulted in the businesses and enterprises, the production forces of modern industry following late 20th-century deindustrialisation, evolving into drivers of urban technological innovation (Brunt & García-Peñalosa, 2021). Industrialisation, though, is not a globally homogeneous process, but in Africa, the world’s least industrialised region, urban areas are rapidly growing; Lagos, Nigeria’s economic hub, for example, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. This phenomenon is linked to employment and wealth created by the continent’s richness in natural resources, such as oil reserves in Angola, Ghana, and Nigeria.
The Key Trends of Modern Urbanisation
“We live in an urban world” is a recurring observation in modern research (Pratschke, 2010; Hall & Barrett, 2012; McHale et al., 2019; Pereira et al., 2024) to describe the 21st-century situation of urban growth and rural decline of the last century.*
Modern urbanisation trends and patterns have been transformed by digital and technological innovations and the increasing demands for sustainable housing, services, and amenities to sustain growing populations and future generations.
The geographical concentration of skilled and innovative people has accelerated the design and implementation of digital and smart solutions to improve productivity and economic development. Smart cities, a term first appearing in the 1990s (Jacques et al., 2024), employ the technology of sensors, devices, and data centres in an interconnected IT network to collect and share real-time urban knowledge and data — “human and social capital” (Szczepańska et al., 2023; De Jong et al., 2024) — to improve well-being, manage a city’s assets, and increase competitiveness (Arghittu et al., 2023; Gracias et al., 2023). The key elements of a smart city — economy, environment, living, people, mobility, and governance (Pira, 2021) — are indicators of a city’s smartness.
The rise of smart cities represents the bold adoption of technology in the future of urban planning and the governance of city populations. While the implementation and integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI have created an intelligent or smart urban environment (Jacques et al., 2024), the data collection raises privacy concerns and cybersecurity risks (Fabrègue & Bogoni, 2023; Johnson, 2023). Limited engagement creates insecurity and affects the public’s acceptance of how their data will be used and shared by the IoT, a network of devices connected by sensors and cloud technology (Jacobs et al., 2020). The lack of transparency can undermine public trust and hamper the support of new technologies and future initiatives.
Linked to the planning of smart cities is the 15-minute city (FMC) — a polycentric as opposed to the traditional monocentric concept of urban planning (Akrami et al., 2024) — designed to improve the quality of life by placing local amenities and services within a 15-minute walk or bicycle ride (Moreno et al., 2021). Cars and public transport would become redundant to fulfil the everyday essentials of “living, working, commerce, healthcare, education, and entertainment” (Khavarian-Garmsir et al., 2023; Elldér, 2024) in this vision of an ideal city designed for speed and efficiency, as proposed by the Franco-Colombian researcher Carlos Moreno (“la ville du quart d’heure”) (Moreno et al., 2021).
While notable examples of FMCs are worldwide in Australia, Europe, and North and South America (Allam et al., 2022; Lu & Diab, 2023; Guzman et al., 2024), they are not ubiquitous. The expansion and aspirations of this human-centred concept are restricted by several limitations relating to the diversity of land development and residents, funding to adapt and diversify, and equality (local gentrification) (Elldér, 2024; Marquet et al., 2024). Furthermore, since FMCs are not master-planned cities, the focus on creating walking environments using existing urban layouts also limits accessibility for the disabled and vulnerable.
The Future
As the trend of rapid global urbanisation and growth of megacities continues, “the future of humanity is undoubtedly urban” (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2022, p.4). The serious challenges of projected population growth (from births and migration patterns) and climate change have accelerated the need for city leaders and authorities to strategically plan and govern the allocation of the large resources required to maintain competitiveness, infrastructure, and living standards. The risk is greater for cities in the developing world, where climate change is already forcing the rural poor to urban centres.
Modern technological developments have been described as the fourth industrial revolution. From energy systems to transportation networks, the social threads and infrastructures of urbanisation have been transformed by the proliferation and implementation of data-driven technological solutions to improve efficiency, safety, and well-being that were “[o]nce confined to the realm of science fiction” (Cugurullo et al., 2023, p.1169). As innovations become more accessible, permeating all aspects of modern life, smart city digitalisation will reshape the urban landscape, though the scale and scope will differ between cities and regions (World Economic Forum, 2022).
Data-driven, constantly evolving, and flourishing centres of innovation, the future of urbanisation is living, breathing, and thinking cities.
*Previously published in Waugh, E. (2024). Sustainable Development in an Urban World. Arcadia, 2 June. Retrieved from https://www.byarcadia.org/post/sustainable-development-in-an-urban-world
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