Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Key Questions
For Chapter 9
1.
When and why did people start living in cities?
2.
Where are cities located and why?
3.
How are cities organized, and how do they function?
4.
How do people shape cities?
5.
What role do cities play in globalization?
In the modern world, urbanization can happen quite
quickly. A rural area or a small town can be transformed
into a major metropolitian area. During the latter part of
the twentieth century, the Chinese government a nnounced
a major economic development project in Guangdong, a
province in southern China. The Chinese government
established a special economic zone (SEZ) in Guangdong
Province, and business and industry mushroomed. The
small fi shing village of Shenzhen in Guangdong Province
is adjacent to Hong Kong. Hundreds of industries moved
from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to take advantage of lower
labor costs. The small fi shing village of Shenzhen experi-
enced extraordinary growth as its population, rushing to
the area to fi nd work, swelled from 20,000 to 8 million
in just three decades. Shenzhen was quickly transformed:
skyscrapers now tower where thatch houses, rice paddies,
and duck ponds once stood (Fig. 9.4).
The urbanization that can happen so quickly today
took thousands of years to develop originally; indeed, the
rise of the city is a very recent phenomenon in human his-
tory. Human communities have existed for over 100,000
years, but more than 90,000 years passed before people
began to cluster in towns. Archaeological evidence indi-
cates that people established the fi rst cities about 8000
years ago. However, only in the last 200 years did cities
begin to resemble their modern size and structure.
WHEN AND WHY DID PEOPLE START
LIVING IN CITIES?
Worldwide, more people live in urban areas than
in rural areas today. China, a traditionally rural coun-
try, reached the point where more than 50 percent of
its population lived in urban areas in 2010. According
to China's census, the country was 36.1 percent urban
in 2000. The rapid urbanization of China is due to the
migration of millions of people from rural to urban areas
since economic liberalization began in 1979.
Urban
refers to the built up space of the cen-
tral city and suburbs. Urban areas include the city and
surrounding environs connected to the city. An urban
place is distinctively nonrural and nonagricultural.
For the vast majority of human history, the world
was largely rural. From the beginnings of human society
to about 3000 BC, less than 1 percent of people lived in
urban areas. With cities established in Mesopotamia, the
Nile River, Mesoamerica, and Asia, the proportion of the
world's population living in cities rose “only slightly.”
After the start of the Industrial Revolution in the
mid-1700s in Great Britain, urbanization exploded “when
some states such as Great Britain and the Netherlands
became predominantly urban for the fi rst time” (Soja
2010, 376). In western Europe, the United States, Canada,
and Japan, four out of fi ve people live in cities or towns
(Fig. 9.3). In China, the fi gure is fi ve out of ten, and in
India, the country's 2011 census reported nearly 7 out of
ten living in rural areas.
The agglomeration of people, services, and goods
in cities affords people the luxury of time to innovate.
Cities are centers of political power and industrial
might, higher education and technological innovation,
artistic achievement, and medical advances. They are
the great markets, centers of specialization and interac-
tion, sources of news and information, suppliers of ser-
vices, and providers of sports and entertainment. Cities
are the anchors and instigators of modern culture; urban
systems and their spokes form the structural skeleton of
society. A
city
is an agglomeration of people and build-
ings clustered together to serve as a center of politics,
culture, and economics.
The Hearths of Urbanization
The switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture
occurred prior to urbanization. Archaeologists fi nd evi-
dence of early agriculture between 10,000 and 12,000
years ago. Archaeologists agree that the fi rst cities came
“several millennia” after the origins of agriculture (Smith
2009). Geographers Edward Soja and Peter Taylor argue
that the fi rst cities came before agriculture, and they cite
the 12,000-year-old settlement of Catal Huyuk as evi-
dence (Fig. 9.5). Archaeologists see Catal Huyuk as an
agricultural village, not a city.
Agricultural villages were relatively small in size
and in population. Everyone living in an
agricultural
village
was involved in agriculture, and the people lived
at near-subsistence levels, producing just enough to get by.
