gh Inevitable urbanization

It seems that in the city-country competition the cities will be in the lead just in the first decade of the 21st century. Scientists from Geography Department of Moscow State University drew the conclusion having analysed a great body of information on world urbanization. According to their calculations just in the very beginning of the 21st century a noticeable event will happen: the urban population will exceed the number of village inhabitants. Thus the city-type relations will be fixed in quantity and formally admitted as dominating ones.

From the 1950s the size of city dwellers doubled every twenty years and their proportion in the world population increased on the average for 7 per cent. Today city population exceeds 2.8 billion people and totals to 47.7 per cent of the entire world population. But in 2010 city-dwellers will exceed villagers in number: 3,586 million versus 3,304 million. However, the geography of distribution of new city-dwellers in the world is not so wide: the half of all citizens falls only on six largest countries - China, India, the USA, Brazil, Russia and Japan.

The picture of urbanization in different countries is rather heterogeneous. On the one hand in two fifth of all countries in the world the rural population still prevails (African and Asian countries), and on the other hand in 52 countries the number of citizens surpasses 75% (countries of Europe, Northern and Latin America). However today the principal increment of city population results mainly from developing countries particularly in Asian region (more than 55%) which in large determines the character of contemporaneous world urbanization process.

In geographical aspect, the vector of urbanization turns from the West to the East. Though it would be more precisely to speak about "turning back to the East", because the East was considered more urban than the West from ancient times up to the middle of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the 1960s Asia restored its leadership in the total number of citizens and surpassed the European continent. Probably Africa should be the second among the world regions just in two decades. It's expected that by 2020 a city population would reach 2,275 million in Asia and 646 million in Africa.

One of the most striking characteristic of modern urbanization is rapid growth both of absolute number of cities including megalopolises (with more than 8 million citizens) and concentration of their population. In the middle of the century only every seventh country of the world had cities-millionaires, and nowadays - every third one. At present, the earth has 372 agglomerations with population of more than 1 million where about 37.6% citizens live that is 17.8% of the total world population.

In the process of cities' formation, the positions of the countries of so called "the third world" have also strengthened. During the last half a century the population of all cities and towns in the developed countries practically doubled, but in the developing countries the six-fold increase in total number of citizens was accompanied by the tenfold growth of population in large cities. Today more than one third of all city-millionaires of the world falls on the Eastern and the South-Western and Central parts of Asia, another one third - on the North America and Europe. Over two fifth of all city-millionaires during 1950-1970 and exactly one half of them appeared on the map of Asia during the next score of years.

During the last half a century, the list of thirty largest cities of the world was obviously renewed. In 1950 cities of European countries and the USA occupied two third positions in it, but in the 1990s there were less than one third of them. Over that period such towns as Milan, Berlin, Philadelphia, Saint-Petersburg, Detroit, Naples, Manchester, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Boston and Hamburg escaped from the list of the leading towns of the world. At the same time Seoul, Djakarta, Delhi, Manila, Karachi, Lagos, Istanbul, Lima, Teheran, Bangkok and Dacca replenished it. By the scientific prognosis only six towns of the developed countries - such as Tokyo, New-York, Los Angeles, Osaka, Paris and Moscow - will stay among the thirty largest towns by 2010, and twenty ones should be replaced by the megalopolises of Asia, and foremost of China and India.

The very fact of evolutionary origin and domination of urban living style is far from being an accident. An important social effect is inherent to compactness of productive forces. Cities give exclusive possibilities for business, creative activity and wealth accumulation. One admit that education, health and social services are here as a rule on much higher level than in rural regions.

The global problem of an extreme significance of cities as principal territorial and social formations in many respects responsible for the most actual tasks of humankind is still within the research theme.

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