What Is Urbanisation and Why Is It Happening?

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🔍 What Is Urbanisation and Why Is It Happening?

Bar chart of the share of the world's people living in towns and cities (urban) and in the countryside (rural). The urban share rises from 30% in 1950 to 55% in 2018, and is projected to reach 68% in 2050.

Figure 1: Urbanisation is a rising share. A bigger share of the world's people live in towns and cities each time, and the share is still projected to rise.

Source: United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects 2018. The 2050 bar is a projection.

Urbanisation is the increase in the proportion of a country's population that lives in towns and cities, rather than rural areas. Notice that it is a proportion, not an absolute number — a country's urban population can grow while its rural population also grows, but if urban areas are growing faster, urbanisation is occurring.

Two things drive urbanisation. The first is rural-to-urban migration — people physically moving from the countryside to cities. The second is natural increase — the fact that within cities, birth rates often exceed death rates, so the urban population grows even without new arrivals. In many rapidly urbanising cities, both forces are acting simultaneously, which is why growth can be so dramatic.

Why Do People Leave Rural Areas? Push Factors

No one leaves their home village because they feel like a change of scenery. They leave because something is pushing them out — making rural life difficult, insecure or unrewarding. The most powerful push factors are:

Mechanisation of farming — When a tractor and a combine harvester can do the work of 50 labourers, those 50 people no longer have jobs. Across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the spread of agricultural machinery has steadily reduced the demand for farm labour, forcing rural workers to look elsewhere for income. In northern Nigeria, mechanised farming in the 1970s and 80s began a wave of southward migration towards Lagos that has never really stopped.
Drought and environmental pressure — In the Sahel region immediately south of the Sahara Desert, rainfall has become increasingly unreliable. When crops fail and wells dry up, survival itself becomes impossible. Families have no choice but to move. Climate change is intensifying this push factor, particularly in northern Nigeria, Niger, and Mali, where entire communities have been abandoned as the desert creeps southward — a process called desertification.
Lack of services — In many rural areas in LICs and NEEs, there may be no secondary school within reasonable reach, no hospital for 50 kilometres, no reliable electricity, and no piped water. Young people in particular are unwilling to accept a life without access to education and healthcare that cities appear to offer.
Conflict — Violence, civil war and insurgency have driven millions of people from rural areas. In north-east Nigeria, the Boko Haram insurgency has displaced over 2 million people since 2009, many of whom have fled south towards Lagos. Conflict is one of the most sudden and traumatic push factors.

Why Do Cities Attract? Pull Factors

Push factors explain why people leave. Pull factors explain why cities specifically become the destination. The key word here is perceived — cities often appear more attractive from the outside than the reality migrants actually find. But the perception is powerful enough to drive migration regardless.

Employment and higher wages — Even informal work (hawking goods on street corners, washing cars, loading trucks) in a city can generate more cash income than subsistence farming. The formal economy offers factory work, construction, domestic service, and in Lagos's case, opportunities in finance, film, and tech. The wage gap between urban and rural areas in Nigeria is substantial.
Better services — Hospitals, secondary schools, universities, banks — these are almost exclusively concentrated in cities in LICs and NEEs. A migrant who settles in Lagos gains access to services that simply do not exist in the village they came from, even if the quality of those services is imperfect.
Social opportunities and networks — Existing migrants act as a magnet. Once a relative or neighbour has established themselves in Lagos, they send money home, share stories of opportunity, and provide a place to stay for the next wave. This creates chain migration — each successful migrant making the next one more likely.
The urban premium — Cities concentrate infrastructure investment, government spending, and economic activity. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: cities offer more, so more people move there, generating more tax revenue, attracting more investment, improving services further, attracting more migrants.

The Urbanisation Spiral

These forces combine into a self-reinforcing process. Understanding this chain is essential for exam answers:

Stage 1: Rural poverty, agricultural job losses, drought or conflict push people to look for alternatives.
Stage 2: Perceived opportunities (wages, services, social networks) in cities pull migrants from rural areas.
Stage 3: Migrants arrive. Most settle — many in informal housing — and find low-wage work in the informal economy.
Stage 4: Successful migrants send remittances home and report positive experiences. This triggers further migration from the same villages.
Stage 5: The existing urban population also grows through natural increase — the young migrants have children. The city's population grows from both inside and outside simultaneously.
Stage 6: Rapid population growth generates demand for services, housing and employment — which creates further economic activity and attracts yet more migrants. The city grows exponentially.

Quick Check: Explain the difference between push factors and pull factors in rural-to-urban migration. Give two examples of each.

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