What Is Urbanization?

Urbanization means a physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change. The United Nations also defines urbanization as movement of people from rural areas to urban areas with population growth.

Urbanization occurs naturally as individuals move into cities to seek economic opportunities including jobs, education, housing, and transportation. People also move into cities to improve one? standard of living.

Cities are also known to be places where money, services and wealth are centralized. Businesses, which generate jobs and capital, are usually located in urban areas. It is also through the cities that foreign money flows into a country in most cases, whether it is through trade or tourism.
For these reasons, urbanization of rural areas has increased in recent years, with agriculture and small-scale industry giving way to modern industry and commerce.

Urbanization is often viewed as a negative trend. One of the reasons is the urban heat island, which has become a growing concern and is increasing over the years.

The urban heat island is formed when industrial and urban areas are developed and heat becomes more abundant. In rural areas, a large part of the incoming solar energy is used to evaporate water from vegetation and soil. But in cities, with less vegetation and exposed soil, the majority of the sun¡¯s energy is absorbed by urban structures and asphalt. As a result, less evaporative cooling in cities makes surface temperatures rise higher than in rural areas during daylight hours. Additional city heat is given off by vehicles and factories, as well as by industrial and domestic heating and cooling units. This effect causes the city to become 1 to 6¡É warmer than surrounding land areas.

Other negative impacts of urbanization also include reduction of soil moisture and intensification of carbon dioxide emissions.

Despite these negative impacts, urbanization is still expected to increase since living in cities permits individuals and families to take advantage of various opportunities such as proximity and diversity.