Explain the causes and global patterns of urbanisation in developed and developing countries

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to define urbanisation, explain its causes, and contrast the timing and pace between developed and developing countries. A strong answer separates the drivers and links the pace of urbanisation to the planning pressures that follow.

What urbanisation is

More than half the world's population now lives in urban areas, and the share is rising fastest in Asia and Africa.

Causes of urbanisation

Urbanisation is driven by two processes: migration and natural increase.

Rural-urban migration is shaped by push and pull factors.

• Push factors drive people out of rural areas: poverty, lack of land, low farm incomes, mechanisation reducing farm work, drought, and limited services and education.
• Pull factors draw people to cities: jobs in industry and services, higher wages, better education and health care, and the perception of opportunity.

Natural increase adds to city populations because migrants are often young adults who then have children, and because urban health care lowers death rates.

The developed-world pattern

Developed countries urbanised early, during the Industrial Revolution, as factories drew workers to cities over many decades. This gradual pace allowed infrastructure and services broadly to keep up. These countries are now highly urbanised, often above eighty percent, and their urban populations grow slowly, mainly through natural increase and immigration. Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth, with most people in a few coastal cities.

The developing-world pattern

Developing countries are urbanising rapidly now, often without the industrial job base that drove earlier urbanisation. Growth is fuelled by high rural-urban migration and high natural increase together. Because cities grow faster than housing, services and jobs can be provided, the result is informal settlements, underemployment and strained infrastructure. This sets up the megacity and liveability challenges examined elsewhere in Unit 4.

A strong answer ends by linking the pace of urbanisation to the planning task: slow, industrially driven urbanisation is more manageable than fast, service-outpacing urbanisation.

The urban transition

Geographers describe a typical urban transition in which a country moves from being mostly rural, through a phase of rapid urbanisation as industry and migration drive city growth, to a highly urbanised, slow-growing end state. Developed countries have largely completed this transition, which is why their urban populations now grow mainly through natural increase and immigration rather than rural-urban migration. Many developing countries are in the steep middle phase, where the urban share is climbing fastest and the planning pressures are most intense. Placing a country on this transition helps explain not only how urbanised it is but how quickly that is changing, and therefore how severe its housing, service and infrastructure challenges are likely to be. Counter-urbanisation, where some people move from large cities back to smaller towns and rural areas, can also appear in highly urbanised societies, showing the process is not strictly one-directional.