ABSTRACT
The contemporary world is becoming more urban. The twenty-first century marks the first time in history that more than half of the world's inhabitants live in cities. This is remarkable given that just 200 years ago the vast majority of people lived in rural areas. Today, all industrial nations have become overwhelmingly urbanized, and the processes of urbanization are accelerating rapidly the world over. This chapter discusses this new urban world with demographic data and notes the concepts of urbanization, urban growth, urban transition, and urbanism. It deals with how the word “city” is related to the word “civilization.”. Some sociologists focus on how people perceive and interact in the built environment of the city-a microlevel approach. Microlevel sociology focuses on the pattern of interactional dynamics especially as they impact on individuals in a social setting. The urban people approach has a basic theme of the search for “meaningful” identity in the urban context and a concomitant notion of “incompleteness”.
