![]() In the United States the rural population of the heavily agricultural West North Central (northern Midwest) census division declined steadily in each decade from 1920 to 1970. ![]() Rural depopulation was most notable in agricultural areas. With declining fertility, the rate of natural increase could no longer counterbalance the effect of net migration loss, initiating a process of outright rural depopulation. Throughout this second phase the share of the population in the countryside continued to decline, and did so eventually also in terms of absolute size. The second phase, commencing in the beginning of the twentieth century but accelerating by mid-century, might be characterized as suburbanization, or perhaps more accurately, as metropolitan expansion. The growth of cities and urban territory outpaced that of the countryside, fed by net rural-urban internal migration. In Europe and North America this phase commenced with the Industrial Revolution and continued into the twentieth century. One can identify four broad phases of rural-urban population balance that characterize the trajectory of these societies.Ī first phase could be termed classic urbanization. In the contemporary industrialized countries, shifts in the internal distribution of the population have moved well beyond simple urbanization. ![]() (In the United States, the rural population was slowly increasing over that period–a rise of 14%–but is projected to gradually decline over the first half of the twenty-first century.) These shifts in population distribution are due to the combined effects of rural outmigration, the changing relative size of the rural and urban populations, rural-urban differences in natural increase, and the reclassification of territory from rural to urban. When urbanization is well advanced, it is accompanied by a decline also in the absolute size of the rural population, as is illustrated for the period from 1950 through 2000 by data for several major European nations: France (-21%), Germany (-47%), Italy (-12%), and the United Kingdom (-22%). For instance, the Japanese rural population share dropped from 50 percent to 21 percent between 19, while in Canada the corresponding drop was from 39 percent to 21 percent. Urbanization, by definition, results in declining share of the population in rural areas. Urbanization has accompanied the demographic transition in virtually all middle-and high-income countries. ![]() Large-scale shifts of population from the countryside to the city have been a feature of the demographic and geographic landscape for more than a century. ![]()
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