Understanding Urbanization: Key Concepts and Processes
Understanding Urbanization
Immigration has been interpreted in three ways:
- First, it is considered a demographic, by which a growing proportion of the population of an area is concentrated in urban areas as defined statistically. This concentration is largely migration from rural areas and the difference between birth and mortality rates.
- The second interpretation relates urbanization to social and economic changes caused by capitalist industrialization. Structural urbanization is linked to industrialization and the evolution of urban complexes.
- The third interpretation is behavioral and based on the idea that cities, particularly big cities, are centers of social change.
Key Urbanization Concepts
Explosive Urbanization: The rapid population increase, especially in larger cities.
According to the UN, megacities are those cities with 8 million people or more.
Megalopolis: The set of metropolitan areas where rapid urban growth leads to contact and areas of influence with each other. In short, the megalopolis is typically formed by big-city conurbations.
Global Cities: A concept promoted by the department of geography to define cities that meet a set of characteristics born due to the impact of globalization and the steady growth of urbanization.
Technopoles: Centers of concentration of research and high-technology production that are not necessarily located in large cities.
Urbanization Process in Argentina
The manifesto from the beginning of the 20th century was one of the most significant in Latin America. Early industrialization, beginning in the 1940s, intensified the increase in urbanization, as factories motivated many rural residents to move.
Argentine Macrocephalic System: The large population concentration in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area is almost 10 times greater than the second most populated city in the country. The GBA is the huge head of the national city system, for this reason, it is called macrocephalic (macro-large, head-head). The transport system is better depending on the organization of the urban system.
Emergence of Argentine Towns and Cities: One of the reasons why the first cities arose was the expansion of the Argentine border livestock farms and network extension in the form of railroads near hills, forts, monasteries, and ports.
Another reason was the emergence of new economic activities that also caused significant growth of towns and small cities.
Cities, according to the number of people they have, are classified into large, medium, or small:
- Small Cities: between 2,000 and 49,999 inhabitants.
- Medium Cities: 50,000 and 499,999 inhabitants.
- Large Cities: excess of 500,000 inhabitants.
Growth Factors of Cities
The factors behind the population growth of cities are vegetative growth and the influx of people from the countryside, as well as other towns and cities. The most industrialized cities are those that have grown more in the last decades because most industries have generated more jobs, and this influences the growth of the population.
In the process of agglomeration, the role of means of communication is essential since the progress of construction in the suburbs usually develops in the first term, and people around the means of communication allows easy access to downtown actively.