Urbanization

In today’s world, more than half of all people live in an area that is considered urban.  By mid century, this number is expected to grow to around 70 percent of all people living in an urban environment.   But 100 years ago, only 2/10 people lived in what we would consider a city.  As we all know, humans were once hunters and gatherers.  Often times traveling to follow their food source.  A turning point in society was when humans began to utilize selective breeding in food production.  Once we learned how to grow animals and food in one spot, we were able to establish semi-permanent or permanent communities.  This is where urbanization really began to start.   Irrigation, soil tilling, and crop rotation also helped increase our food production.  Eventually humans got to a point in time where not everyone had to be producing food.  This led to the development of other trades and eventually, industry.  This caused trade to flourish, and as trade grew, so did technology.  This is the first time we began to develop what we would call today, a city.  With cities popping up all over the world, we needed to create an infrastructure system.  People began to move to the cities from rural communities for work to build this infrastructure.  In today’s world, urbanization is continuing to grow, as is our population.  People are moving out of rural communities to work in cities as the United States and the world moves more towards a service economy.  So how do we accommodate for all these people entering our cities?  Also, it is important to consider what impact on our environment this will have, and what our infrastructure needs will have to be.  And we need to make it as easy as possible for these people to have a role/job in these communities, to reduce the probability of creating slums. 

Slums in early larger US cities like the ones in New York created a lot of problems.  Hygiene was extremely poor, and infectious diseases were the number one cause of death.  Dead animals and excrement lined the streets, safe drinking water was hard to come by, and the amount of people employed regularly was very low.  In fact, we often think cities are as densely populated now as they have every been, but that is not the case.  Cities used to be much more densely populated, and it was not out of the ordinary to have a whole family living in one room.  Since than we have made some significant improvements to extinguishing the side effects of urbanization, but maybe not as much as you would think.  Public housing is the low income housing in urban areas.  It is often ridden with crime, low sanitation, and lack of infrastructure even today.  As a country we are trying to reduce this.  We do this by making housing more affordable, creating better and more jobs, and getting crime rates down.  Of course this is easier said than done, and will take years to make any significant impact.  But even as we work towards reducing some current problems, the future ad increased population will surely bring about some new problems.