Urban population

“ In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, high-ways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. ”

“ Professor Carver asks why does urban population grow, and again answers—the law of diminishing returns. The real reply is that urban population grows because the scale of production is increasing. Centralized industry yields a greater return than localized workers receive. ”

“ In this way the city acquires an organization which is neither designed nor controlled.
Physical geography, natural advantages, and the means of transportation determine in advance the general outlines of the urban plan. As the city increases in population, the subtler influences of sympathy, rivalry, and economic necessity tend to control the distribution of population. Business and manufacturing seek advantageous locations and draw around them a certain portion of the population. ”

“ From the preceding formidable array of testimony it appears that the tendency of urban populations is certainly not toward the pure blond, long-headed, and tall Teutonic type. The phenomenon of urban selection is something more complex than a mere migration of a single racial element in the population toward the cities. ”

“ This is the century of the 'urban revolution' in the 35 years since 1950, the number of people living in cities almost tripled, increasing by ,.25 billion. In the more developed regions, the urban population nearly doubled, from 447 million to 838 million. ”

“ In America the rapid increase in the size of the cities was due chiefly to an increasing stream of European immigrants who avoided the farm but were attracted to the urban environment. Population statisticians have been alert to discover whether this process is continuing or whether a change is taking place. Improvements in rural life and conscious efforts to control the movement of population have been observed as to their possible effect on the rural-urban population equilibrium. ”

“ Before leaving the statistics of the growth of cities, it is worth our while to note that certain great urban centers are developing in this country which promise to show, even in the near future, the most extensive urbanization of population known to the world ”

“ There is no absolute correspondence between the proportion of urban population and the proportion of eminent persons born.3 An analysis of the per cent, of population which is urban shows that while New England is far in the lead of the other sections of the country, there are a number of states which report a large proportion of eminent persons born and a comparatively small proportion of urban population. ”

“ The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. ”

“ The changes incident to city life in the birth, death, and marriage rates of the population are noticeable on the basis of statistics. These phenomena permit of sociological interpretation and analysis. The difference between the urban and the rural span of life offers a similar problem to the investigator. The proportions of the human scrap-heap and its social consequences in the city have been recognized as an important phase of urban existence. ”

“ It is a population of an extremely modern type. Urban concentration has already gone far with it; fifteen millions of it are crowded into and about twenty great cities, other eighteen millions make up five hundred towns. Between these centres of population run railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of various sorts, but to the European eye these are mere scratchings on a virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself through this thin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the railroad side. ”

“ Their arqument is that many of the most powerful stimuli to rapid urbanization in the past have less influence today, and that changing government policies could reduce the comparative attractiveness of cities, especially the largest cities, and slow rate of urbanization.
7. The urban population growth rate in developing countries as a whole has been slowing down from 5.2 per cent per r annum in the late 195Os to 3.4 per cent in the 1980s. [5] It is expected to decline even further in the coming decades. ”

“ The city has been studied, in recent times, from the point of view of its geography, and still more recently from the point of view of its ecology. There are forces at work within the limits of the urban community—within the limits of any natural area of human habitation, in fact—which tend to bring about an orderly and typical grouping of its population and institutions. ”

“ The proportion of the population living in cities seems to have been practically constant throughout the 18th century and up to 1820. The great growth of urban centres has been a result of industrial expansion since that time. ”

“ That census also reported that "the rate of increase for the population of urban areas was over three times that for the population living in rural territory."
The industrial section of this urban population was largely composed of non-home owners. The census of 1900 reported "that the largest proportion of hired homes, 87.9 per cent, is found in New York City. In Manhattan and Bronx boroughs the proportion is even higher, 94.1 per cent, as compared with 82 per cent for Brooklyn.... ”

“ How many people own their own homes? What proportion of the population consists of nomads, hobos, gypsies? On the other hand, certain urban neighborhoods suffer from isolation. Efforts have been made at different times to reconstruct and quicken the life of city neighborhoods and to bring it in touch with the larger interests of the community. Such is in part the purpose of the social settlements. These organizations and others which are attempting to reconstruct city life have developed certain methods and a technique for stimulating and controlling local communities. ”

“ The one single outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family life is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of population in the cities. The United States Census Bureau counts all residents in cities of over 8,000 population as "urban." ”

“ In the large cities all these are intensified, but they are everywhere apparent whenever a community passes beyond the village stage. The line that separates the village or small town from the city is an arbitrary one. The United States calls those communities rural that have a population not exceeding twenty-five hundred, but it is less a question of population than of interests and activities. When agriculture gives place to trade or manufacturing as the leading economic interest; when the community takes on the social characteristics that belong to urban life ”

“ Contemporaneously with this marvelous growth of urban centers, we observe a progressive depopulation of the rural districts. What is going on in our New England States, especially in Massachusetts, is entirely characteristic of large areas in Europe. Take Prance, for example. Most of us are aware of the distressing demographic condition of affairs in that country. One of the finest populations in Europe is almost at a standstill numerically; nay, some years show an actual decrease of population. ”

“ We have decided in particular that unlike the civilized community of the immediate past which lived either in sharply-defined towns or agriculturally over a wide country, this population will be distributed in a quite different way, a little more thickly over vast urban regions and a little less thickly over less attractive or less convenient or less industrial parts of the world. ”

“ Some of the first things we want to know about the city, therefore, are: sources of population; immigration and natural growth; distribution of population within the city as affected by (a) economic, i.e., land, values, (b) sentimental interests, race, vocation, etc.; comparative growths of the population within different portions of the city area, as affected by birth- and death-rates, marriage and divorce, etc. The neighborhood.—Proximity and neighborly contact are the basis for the simplest and most elementary form of association with which we have to do in the organization of city life. ”

“ We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of life we’re used to here. But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for ’em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern ideals. ”

“ If then, there are twenty such avenues to the metropolis, it appears that the total of the regular ingress and egress will be 16,000 persons, of whom perhaps 8,000 walk, 2,000 arrive in public conveyances, and 6,000 ride on horseback, or in open or close carriages. Such a phenomenon is presented no-where else in the world; and it never can exist except in a city which unites the same combined features of population, wealth, commerce, and the varied employments which belong to our own vast metropolis. ”

“ We might also show that, in the metropolis and its suburbs, there exist types of every class of poor that can be found in the rural and manufacturing districts of England; just as it might be shown, that its inhabitants consist of natives of every county in the three kingdoms. Its fixed population, according to the quarter in which they live, would be found to resemble the inhabitants of a great town, a cathedral city, or a seat of manufactures. ”

“ Every large city has its occupational suburbs like the Stockyards in Chicago, and its residence suburbs like Brookline in Boston, each of which has the size and the character of a complete separate town, village, or city, except that its population is a selected one. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of these cities within cities, of which the most interesting characteristic is that they are composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races but of the same social class, is East London, with a population of 2,000,000 laborers. ”

“ CONSULS. The population of a large town is perpetually receiving accessions from the country—not for the purpose of increasing the aggregate of inhabitants, but to supply the waste of existence which takes place in such a scene, and to furnish a better selection for the peculiar offices and business of a city than what could be obtained from the successive generations of the ordinary inhabitants. ”

“ But we must not therefore assume that the metropolitan populations consume the metropolitan matches. Taking the population at upward of two millions, and the inhabited houses at about three hundred thousand, let us endeavor to estimate the distribution of these little articles of domestic comfort. ”

“ In each city the sections built up by the different factors may be clearly distinguished, these flourishing or decaying according to the prosperity or decline of their special factors. Thus the railroads, docks and warehouses evidence the city's commerce; the factories its industrial energies; the retail shops the consuming power of the population; the residence sections the wealth, social grades and numbers of the citizens; and the buildings of public and semi-public utility the standard of civilization and civic pride of the city. ”

“ Statistics can give you no conception of this crowding. If you refer to the results of the last census, you find the average population per house, in the City of London Union to be 7·1; in the East and West London Unions, 8·8; for the construction of these averages, the most dissimilar materials are blended together; and the density of population is apparently reduced by the very large number of business-houses which have no resident inmates, beyond the porter or the housekeeper who has charge of them. ”

“ In the year 1787, this city contained more than 40,000 inhabitants, and was rapidly increasing in population, owing to its being the seat of government, and the residence of many wealthy and luxurious families, by which it attracts considerable commerce. ”

“ The concentrated population of cities, for example, would ever have, under such a distribution, far more weight in the government, than the same number in the scattered and sparse population of the country. One hundred thousand individuals concentrated in a city two miles square, would have much more influence than the same number scattered over two hundred miles square. ”

“ And can there be a doubt that the large disproportion in the distribution of the population between city and country, in the interior, will be lessened, so that, instead of being, as now, only one to five or six, they will rapidly approach the proportion of one to two or three? ”

“ In similar dwellings are living five hundred and ten thousand persons, (nearly one half of the inhabitants of the city,) chiefly from the laboring classes, of very moderate means, and also the uncounted thousands of those who do not know to-day what they shall have to live on to-morrow. This immense population is found chiefly in an area of less than four square miles. ”