Schools and shops are more easily accessible than in rural areas.Ĭities have always been at the center of economic growth and technological advances.
This allows the government and others to provide services such as water, electricity, and transportation to a larger number of people. People are concentrated in a small space rather than being spread out over a large territory. TIL: There’s Probably a Raccoon Living On Your BlockĬities make a lot of sense for humans. Are suburbs, which are often called metropolitan areas, part of cities? Depending on the boundaries used, Tokyo can have a population of anywhere between 8 and 40 million people. But today's city boundaries are often blurred. Urban is defined as "that which is characteristic of a city." But what exactly is a city? In the past, walls may have defined a city. Most of that urbanization is taking place in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While less than one-third of the world's population lived in cities in 1950, about two thirds of humanity is expected to live in urban areas by 2030. But the most rapid growth has taken place over the past 50 years. At that time, large numbers of people moved to cities in search of jobs, mostly in factories. Urban growth, also known as urbanization, accelerated dramatically with the advent of industrialization some 200 years ago. At first, these settlements depended largely on agriculture and domestic cattle, but as they grew in size they became centers for merchants and traders. Cities have existed for thousands of years and can be traced back to the river valley civilizations of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), Egypt, India, and China.