Chapter 16 Population and Urbanization

           Population is the number of people that live in an area at a particular time. It is clear how population in the 1800’s is not the same as today, and this change in population has led to a change in the social characteristics of many individuals within the population. The amount of population is not the only thing that has changed, but also the way they are distributed. Population used to be on separate small groups apart from each other. Population movement, which will be furthered explained, has caused effects such as urbanization, which is how population has been moving towards big cities and concentrating on big cities. Many theories have been created to explain these changes in the population and population movements worldwide.

The field of science that studies population is called demography. Demographers measure the growth of a population by finding its birthrate. The term fertility, when used by sociologists around the world, refers to the actual number of births occurring to women of childbearing age. Fecundity is different than fertility, fecundity refers to the biological capability to bear children. Population is also affected by mortality, which is the number of deaths within a society. Demographers call the amount of deaths that occur in a society, death rate. When the death is of a kid under the age of one, then it is included in the infant mortality rates, which includes the record of all the deaths of children under 1 year old. The average number of years that a person born in a particular year can expects to live is called life expectancy. The third factor that demographers take into account is migration, the number of individuals that are entering the society and come from somewhere else. Demographers can calculate the migration rate by finding the annual difference between migration and emigration. In reality, the long-term effect of such a growth rate on population size is related to a population’s doubling time.

Population growth on the last decades.

              Like mentioned before, there are many theories that try to explain these phenomenon, some of the following are part of the most respected by demographers around the world. The demographic transition theory says that population patterns are tied to a society’s level of technological development. If we were to follow the demographic transition theory, there would be a point in which the stage three population, or society, will reach a point in which its birth rates and death rates are the same, so population won’t be neither increasing nor decreasing, this phenomenon is called zero population growth. Viewing that population might become a major 21rst century problem, many countries have begun to promote family planning, which give many options to families to be able to “plan” their children and not have families with many children, instead have small families that will reduce the population.

              Urbanization, urbanization is a movement involves the concentration of the population in cities. To completely understand the definition of urbanization it would be most proper to understand some key terms of the definition, for example, “a city is a permanent concentration of a relatively large number of people who are engaged mainly in non-farming activities”. Over urbanization, “a situation in which more people live in a city than can be supported in term s of jobs and facilities”, has lately become a great problem in countries that are not yet that developed. The concentric zone model which helps to describe urban structure was created in 1925 by Ernest W. Burgess. The sector model argues that growth occurs in wedge-shaped sectors, outward from the center of the city, the multiple nuclei model, on the other hand, argues that a city does not develop around one central core but around several centers of activity. Unplanned cities, such as Tegucigalpa, follow a urban sprawl pattern, which is characterized by poorly planned development on the edge of cities and towns. Louis Wirth put forward an urban anomie theory.  Compositional theory views the ways in which the composition of a city’s population influences life in the city.

       Population trends have simply gone beyond what anyone would have ever imagined, growing from 1 billion 200 years ago, to over 7 billion today, just amazing, and, where is this population at? 2004 was the official date when exactly 50% of the population lived in rural areas and the other 50% in cities, that number must be much more higher on the city side by now, now that’s what any sociologist would call urbanization.