World Population Becomes More Urban Than Rural

biohack writes "A major demographic shift took place on Wednesday, May 23, 2007: For the first time in human history, the earth's population is more urban than rural. According to scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia, on that day, a predicted global urban population of 3,303,992,253 exceeded that of 3,303,866,404 rural people. In the US, the tipping point from a majority rural to a majority urban population came early in the late 1910s."

Comments

Let's hear it for urbanism!

[JanneM]

The 50/50 tipping point doesn't have much other than symbolic value, of course, but it is another signpost on the road forward for humanity. Cities can be - and are - miserable hellholes, of course, but remember that even a bad slum is often a substantial step up compared to a life of rural landlessness.

A city is also quite a lot more efficient than having the same number of people spread out in small communities over a vastly larger area. This goes both for providing seeded services and for pollution - it's far easier and more efficient to process the concentrated waste water from a million people in one set of facilities than try to process the same amount spread out over many small, disconnected systems. Critical services like high-quality health care, communications infrastructure and so on is also much more efficient - or only doable at all in some cases - in an urban environment. Having 200k people taking public transport to work every morning (and an equivalent number walking or bicycling) is a lot better for everybody than having those same people take individual cars. Osaka is a good example, with just about a quarter driving, a quarter using public transport and a quarter walking or bicycling (the last quarter is split up into combinations of more than one mode). By contrast, in a rural environment, the vast majority would list car or motorbike as their mode.

So stop playing in the mud and come to the city! We're open all night!

Re:Let's hear it for urbanism!

[Lord Ender]

The cities in Ohio are surrounded by "luxury" apartment complexes. These are, essentially, little nature preserves surrounded by city. They only have one road in/out, so no ambulances or fire trucks ever drive by, and there is NO traffic noise. Everyone has lakeside property (man-made lakes, though). They are totally surrounded by trees, so you can't see the rest of the city when you are inside. On a short walk from your apartment to your car, you are likely to pass rabbits, ducks, squirrels, and other naturey things. Despite this, you can be almost anywhere in the city in 10 minutes.

Living in the city does NOT imply any of the things you mention, if you are willing to pay a little extra for it.

Re:Stats all the way to the single digits

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they calculate that? I mean, they cannot have that high of a confidence level in those numbers.

Does it matter? The population density between rural and urban is arbitrary. You could arbitrarily define any number for rural or urban. From one definition on the USDA website:

The basic concept remains intact, namely that rural includes open country and small settlements of less than 2,500 persons. However, there are many small towns and cities that have adjoining towns or suburbs, both incorporated and unincorporated aggregations. The Bureau has defined such urban clusters regardless of political boundaries. For example, a small town of 2,000 people with an adjacent densely settled suburb of 800 people would be designated as an urban cluster with a population of 2,800. Under 1990 procedures there would be no combination and the population would remain rural.

Conversely, the Bureau identified rural parts of incorporated towns whose city limits are very broad and include some thinly settled territory. Thus, if a town of 5,000 people has 500 residents living in thinly settled portions, the 500 are classified as rural and the urban population would be just 4,500. Does 2,500 people in a town mean anything special? How would the numbers change for the US is we went to 2,600? I came from a town of 30,000 and I thought that was Hicksville. The standards for this study are probably different that that of the USDA, but it doesn't matter. It will be arbitrary as well. You can pick your timeline for when the world became more urban than rural as you pick your definitions for rural and urban. And if you can get past that hurdle, then you can try to figure out your uncertainties in your numbers.

vast cities

[bit trollent]

I often marvel at the civilization we live in.

Millions of people drive to work at 65 miles per hour on giant freeways only one wrong move away from dieing an unexpected death. These freeways are spectacular monuments to our society. They are closest most of us will ever get to flying under our own control and they are what make a giant city possible. Crossing a large city takes over an hour at freeway speeds. The scenery of giant buildings and thousand of other buildings and residences rushing by seemingly endlessly is beautiful in a way.

I'm glad the world's population is more urban than rural. cities rock.

predicted?

[dwater]

> ...a predicted global urban population of...

"predicted"?? Does that mean they think it's going to happen sometime in the future, or that some time in the past they thought it was going to happen now (ok, day before yesterday)?

To Quote the Poet....

[flyneye]

To quote the poet/philosopher Lee Ving:
Spent my whole life in the city,
Where junk is king and the air smells shitty.
People pukin' everywhere.
Piles of blood, scabs and hair.
Bodies wasted in defeat,
People dyin' on the street,
But the suburban scumbags, they don't care,
Just get fat and dye their hair!

I love livin' in the city [x2]

Re:Early in the late 1910s?

[RedWizzard]

I am going to assume that it means "in the late 1910s, which is much earlier than the 2007 date for the world at large". What a difference a comma would have made:

In the US, the tipping point from a majority rural to a majority urban population came early, in the late 1910s." Punctuation: it's not just for making faces.

Modern Society

[maaskaas]

I think that this statistic just shows the course of modern society. More and more people are seeking "better" lives, and arguably this is what the city symbolises to someone from a rural community. Furthermore, I doubt that there will be food shortages if this trend continues rapidly in the favour of urbanisation because agriculture is an industry, and a heavily modernised industry at that. Our food does not come from poor little people working barefeet in harsh environments - it comes fat, rich bosses who owns agricultural industries. However, yes, it can be said that the actual workers are quite poor. Thinking about it, the growth of urbanisation and the decline of the rural populations will actually boost the industries dependent on it because the demand for products will become higher and the supply will have to be matched - and working for these firms will probably prove more profitable than cleaning tables in the urban areas. Just a few thoughts...

Re:Dangerous?

[iminplaya]

All those possessions will probably be stolen before they have any chance to trade with the farmers. And yes they are quite neighborly. Say all the nasty things you want. And as primitive as our infrastructure may appear to you, it actually is a bit more robust. I only need to point out the differences between Hurricanes Wilma and Katrina to make my point. Even most of the palapas withstood better than those fancy townhouses did when Wilma went whizzing through Florida, and it killed more people in Florida. Pretty obvious when you take into account that nobody died from that storm in Mexico. Now Chiapas was a completely different story. Their infrastructure is totally a "fair weather friend". But people came to their aid instead of just rounding them up. As nasty as it was, I consider it better than what happened to New Orleans. Truly inexcusable that was. But watching those rivers was truly impressive. You could feel the power just standing close by, just the noise was something you can't imagine, going on for weeks! And I bet it would have done just as much damage to an American town. It's really just an example of what can happen when people get complacent over a period of time, no matter where they are. Self sufficiency has its benefits, even if luxury isn't always one of them. Little by little I'm getting there, and I should be able to even keep my connection up in all but the worst of times. Having a couple of hectares sure would be nice though. Someday...

Re:Stats all the way to the single digits

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully My Hicksville is more Urban with a population of more than 40k+
http://www.city-data.com/city/Hicksville-New-York. html

Sig figs don't work that way

[Nf1nk]

Whether they say 53,103,102 or 53,000,000, it's still to the person. Just because one number is a little more "neat" than the other, there's no way to know which one is more accurate. The actual number could be higher than the first number, meaning rounding down would just make it even less accurate. It makes more sense to me to give a result that's in the middle of the error range than rounding.

In uncertainty analysis there is something known as implied uncertainty it is the uncertainty of a number given by the instrument that measured the number. 53,103,102 just as a number has an implied uncertainty of +-.5 which for people is clearly bunk, so for something that partials don't exist the number appears exact. 53,000,000 has implied uncertainty of +-500,000 this show considerable range of possible numbers. The first number is implied by the second, but the second reflects a much less accurate measurement.

It makes me cringe when I see numbers like 53,103,102 +- 623,103, that number is clearly crap. They admitted that there is a large uncertainty, but the excessive significant figures implies a high degree of confidence in the numbers. If you understand the normal distribution you would know that it is safe to call that same number 53,100,000 +-620,000 because the true number has a high probability of being within that range