Chongqing is a dense and smoky inland city, the heavy-industry, high-rise home to over 30 million people. It is to China what Chicago was to 20th-century America, or Manchester to 19th-century England, and it’s growing at an extraordinary rate. Every day a tide of 1,500 new people washes in to Chongqing. Every day an extra 1.5 million square feet of floor space is constructed for new residents. It’s a vast megalopolis, a megacity of the sort that will soon take over the world.
I met Mr and Mrs Zhang on the day they first arrived in Chongqing from their rural village. It had taken them almost ten years to raise enough money to move and required outrageous sacrifice: a brutal savings regime and years living in a fetid slum far away from their children, who they saw only once a year. On the week I visited them in the sweltering heat of the Sichuan summer, they had pooled together their accumulated cash from years of sweated labour in motorcycle-parts factories, and had paid the full purchase price of 150,000 yuan (£14,000) for a clean and elegant three-bedroom apartment, turning them, legally, into city-dwellers. In the next few months they will bring their parents over from the village, shutting the farm down and ending their family’s millennia-long connection to the fields. The driving force behind their exodus, Mrs Zhang, is a spark plug of a woman with tired eyes but a pitbull’s tenacity, who long ago resolved to save her family from peasant farming at any cost.
The Zhangs are the archetypal people of the 21st century, and we ignore their story at our peril. For the defining force of this century, almost certainly more significant than war, recession and perhaps even climate change, will be the huge and final shift of human populations from rural areas to cities. It’s a crucial issue — one that every politician, every economist and sociologist should be considering. Because the mind-boggling fact is that we will end this century as a fully urban species.
The final great migration began in the developing world after the second world war, and it is just reaching its peak now. There’s no turning back. It’s a great wave that will irreversibly shift the poorest two thirds of the world to cities.
It sounds frightening, especially to the lucky, affluent, Western middle classes who dream of nothing so much and so often as moving to the country. But our urban future shouldn’t be an alarming prospect. The migration to cities will create enormous tensions, conflicts and cultural clashes, but it also means a vast reduction in poverty and suffering, and an end to the major ongoing concern of human history: continuous, unrestrained population growth.
In Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan, the move to the largest cities is now fully complete. The rural areas represent between 5 and 25 per cent of the population, and those numbers have generally been stable for decades. For the most part these people live in villages by choice and not by force of necessity. But what about the countryside? What about farming? Well, fewer than 5 per cent of Western populations are now employed in agriculture — sometimes as little as 2 per cent — and this is enough to produce more food, at low cost, than their urban populations can consume. Now that the poor half of the world is once again experiencing food shortages, it is desperately important that this high-yield agriculture develop in the poor half of the world.
And, indeed, this is the transformation that is now taking place in South America, in Asia, and gradually but inexorably in Africa. At the moment, only 41 per cent of Asians and 38 per cent of Africans live in cities; the rest are largely subsistence farmers, people whose entire livelihoods depend on the vicissitudes of weather, fertilisation and crude credit relations. They are on the land not because it is a better life, but because they are trapped.
This is changing fast — witness all the Mr and Mrs Zhangs and their single-minded determination to leave the land. Between now and 2050, the world’s cities will absorb an additional 3.1 billion people. It is a move that began in earnest in the second half of the 20th century when South American and Middle Eastern villagers left their homes to build new enclaves on the urban outskirts, and is entering its most intense phase now.
It’s difficult to argue with the figures. The population of the world’s countryside will stop growing around 2019, according to the UN Population Division’s more conservative estimates, and by 2050 will have fallen by 600 million because of migration to the city. India’s rural population, one of the last to stop growing, is set to peak in 2025 at 909 million, and shrink to 743 million by 2050. Each month, there are five million new city-dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Between 2000 and 2030, the urban population of Asia and Africa will double, adding as many city-dwellers in one generation as these continents have accumulated during their entire histories.
By the end of 2025, 60 per cent of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70 per cent; and by century’s end the entire world, even the poor nations of sub-Saharan Africa, will be at least three quarters urban. And this point, when the entire world is as urban as the West is today, will mark an end point. Once humans urbanise, or migrate to more urban countries, they almost never return — even great global recessions don’t persuade them to leave. After this final half of humanity has moved to the cities, there will be migrations again, but never again a mass movement on this scale.
Humanity will have reached a new and permanent equilibrium.
Why is it so important to think about this now? Well, just think of the implications — for international aid for example. If we approach poor countries with aid money in the hope of helping villagers remain as subsistence-level peasants, as many charities and government agencies now do, we make a terrible mistake. There is no romance in village life. Rural living is the largest single killer of humans today, the greatest source of malnutrition, infant mortality and early death.
Urban poverty may force a mother to send her child into the street to sell goods; rural poverty will cause that child to die of starvation. People do not, as an almost universal rule, die of hunger in cities. Urban incomes everywhere are higher, often by large multiples; access to education, health, water and sanitation as well as communications and culture are always better in the city.
This is true no matter how you define ‘rural’ and ‘urban’: it doesn’t matter whether a country defines ‘urban’ as 100,000 people or whether it only takes 5,000 to make a proper town, the results are the same. Hania Zlotnik, the Mexican-American woman who is responsible for keeping track of the world’s population on behalf of the United Nations, has told me how surprising she finds this. ‘What’s amazing to me, given all these problems of definition,’ she says, ‘is that when they do surveys of child mortality, adult mortality, education levels, fertility — the urban areas, no matter what, have much better indicators than the rural areas. It becomes a discriminating definition of who’s doing better.’
Urbanisation doesn’t just improve the lives of those who move to the city; it improves conditions in the countryside, too, by giving villages the finance they need to turn agriculture into a business with salaried jobs and stable incomes. These remittances are the largest sources of foreign-trade income in places like Bangladesh and Guatem ala, and are many times larger than all the foreign-aid spending of every Western government and charity; they are very much responsible for the decline of poverty and the rise of commercial agriculture in these countries.
The dramatic declines in the number of very poor people in the world around the turn of this century (98 million people left poverty between 1998 and 2002 and the world poverty rate fell from 34 per cent in 1999 to 25 per cent in 2009) were caused entirely by urbanisation: people made better livings when they moved to the city, and sent funds back to the village.
There is a dangerous tendency among observers across the political spectrum in both the West and in the educated populations of the developing world to see this urban transformation as a source of overcrowding and sprawl, to imagine that a megacity grows just by the accumulation of shantytowns, or ever less pleasant, quick-fix housing estates in the suburbs. But in fact, there’s yet another important factor to consider: megacities swallow villages.
Oddly, rural-to-urban migration, in spite of its huge scope, is not the major cause of urban growth. For each 60 million new city-dwellers in the developing world, 36 million are born to established city-dwellers. Only 24 million come from villages, and only half of these have actually migrated; the rest become urbanites because their village has been incorporated into a growing city.
One last, crucial, calming fact for the anxious. It can feel to a native city-dweller as if the floods of newcomers to a city mean that the population as a whole is expanding wildly, beyond our ability to control it.
But rural-migrant enclaves — I call them ‘arrival cities’ in my new book by that title — are not causing population growth; in fact, they are ending it. When villagers migrate to the city, their family size drops, on average, by at least one child per family, almost always to below the steady-population rate of 2.1 children. Look at what happened in Iran and Turkey. In those countries, mothers were having between five and eight children each in the 1980s; they now have fast-shrinking populations, entirely because of urbanisation. Without massive rural-to-urban migration, the world’s population would be growing at a far faster pace than it is today.
So thanks to megacities, at some point this century the population of the world will stop growing. After reaching a peak, for the first time in history there will stop being more and more humans each year, and the prospect of a Malthusian population crisis will end. This will be a direct result of urbanisation and the flow of money, knowledge and education from the cities back to the villages.
When will the population peak? No one can be certain. Mrs Zlotnik’s team places the date around 2050, with 9 billion people in the world; a tiny difference in average family sizes would have huge consequences. But it will happen. The urbanisation of the species will, in the end, be our salvation.
Doug Saunders’s book Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World is published by Heinemann. He is the European bureau chief for the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail.
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