ABSTRACT
In outline terms at least, the course of global urbanisation can be summarised succinctly by a few distractingly simple statistics. Humans have lived in settlement clusters of sufficient size to occasion use of the label “urban” for at least 5,500 years, and perhaps longer. But viewed historically, this represents only a relatively short period in relation to the 30,000 or so years that modern humans are thought to have inhabited the world. However, as will be exemplified later, once established, the spread of urban settlements and predominantly urban modes of life was at first a relatively slow process. For example, by 1800, nearly five and a half millennia after the development of the first true cities, only an estimated 3 per cent of the total world population was to be found living in towns and cities. The fact that when the change came it did so with unprecedented speed is attested by the observation that at the present time, approximately 40 per cent of the world's fast increasing total population resides in large urban agglomerations. It is projected that this proportion will rise to 50 per cent by the turn of the twentieth century and 90 per cent by the year 2050. Thus, in a mere 250 year period, the world will have been transformed from a predominantly rural mode of life to an almost exclusively urban one. Accounting for the processes underlying these ostensibly straightforward facts concerning the temporal march of world urbanisation is an altogether much more difficult task, and one that has fascinated academic social scientists for some considerable time.
