Alistair Hall
Discuss the causes of urbanisation around the world
Urbanisation is the growth of in the proportion of a country’s population that lives in urban as opposed to the rural area. We can see how urbanisation is increasing globally by the switch over of the majority of the global population living in rural areas to urban areas in 2007, and how the percentage of the global population living in urban areas is now 53% as well as their being 28 megacities around the world as of 2015.
The primary reason for the increase in urbanisation around the world is the process of rural-urban migration (mainly in developing countries/NICs). This can be seen in the mega city of Delhi, where its total population is over 17million and has since increased by 285,000 due to migration alone. The reasons for these migrants to move from the rural to urban areas can be due to centrifugal or centripetal forces. A Centrifugal force is something that pushes people away from the rural areas and into the urban areas for example rural poverty and environmental degradation, while Centripetal forces is something that attracts people into cities which are usually the perceived benefits and opportunities of education, employment, shelter, electricity, food and water. These forces are demonstrated by migration of people into the city of Delhi. The Centrifugal forces include the pressure on the land in rural areas, such as parts of the state of Uttah Pradesh, and the farms being fragmented making farming inefficient and cause declining yields and therefore increasing poverty within the rural areas. Another centrifugal force is the literacy rate of Uttah Pradesh is 57% which is below the national average (66%) so anywhere is better for those who want a better education somewhere else in the country. Centripetal forces also include the greater literacy rate in Delhi (90%) due to there being