The term urbanization comes from the Latin expression urbi, which means city. On the other hand, urbi is derived from the Sumerian word Ur, one of the first two cities in history, located in the Mesopotamian region and formed around 6000 BC. Ç. Archaeological studies point to another location in Mesopotamia, Uruk, as being the first notoriously 'urban' city. Around 3500 BC C., Uruk already had an advanced structural arrangement, stimulated by commercial attributions and the development of cuneiform writing.
Even with this analogy between the urban and the city, in fact, the city is the place of the urban, because not all city is fully urban, sometimes the functions of the city can be related to extractivism and farming. An urban area has as precepts a large agglomeration of people linked to the complex relations of industrialization, the circulation of goods, people and capital flows. All these features complement each other when we analyze a typically urban landscape, marked by equipment urban areas such as buildings, paving, lighting, structural works and the intense individualism that marks the era of metropolises.
In this sense, urbanization as we know it was initiated from the Industrial Revolution, in the century XVIII, at first in England and later spreading to other places in Europe and in the States United. The first factories caused a great rural exodus due to the need to absorb labor and create consumer markets. Concomitantly, the machines of the Industrial Revolution invaded the countryside, mechanizing farming and expelling peasants from their land.
The urban phenomenon came accompanied by a series of problems. The first urban agglomerations in England and France combined air pollution, lack of basic sanitation and precarious living conditions for its inhabitants. In the second half of the nineteenth century, urban planning in rich countries considered all these problems, making urban areas more suitable for economic functions, while still meeting the demands of the society. In countries like Brazil, urbanization was slow and took longer to materialize. Colonial functions postponed the modernization of Brazilian cities that were limited to the provision of raw materials, as the colony could not reach a level of organization equivalent to that of the metropolis.
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Only with the spread of industrial activity in Brazil, consolidated after the 2nd World War, were the directions of Brazilian urbanization defined. This means that countries that had a late industrialization process, such as Brazil, also had a late and unplanned urbanization. The rural exodus that started in Brazil in the 1950s caused a swelling of the cities, known nowadays as urban macrocephaly. So much so that, in 1950, the Brazilian urban population represented a total of 18.8%. In 1965, this percentage reached more than 50%, making Brazil an urban country.
This retrospective contributed to the occurrence of urban challenges present in industrialized underdeveloped countries, such as the lack of basic sanitation, floods, urban violence, inefficient transport system, lack of housing, increased informality and segregation sociospatial. The low quality of life and the different types of pollution and environmental degradation are strongly linked to the urban landscape imaginary of the big cities of the underdeveloped world.
According to official reports from the United Nations, the world population started to have more people living in urban centers than in rural areas in the year 2008. Currently, the urban corresponds to 52.1% of the planet's population. In developed countries, this average is 77.7%, against 46.5% in underdeveloped countries. According to the 2010 Census carried out by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), Brazil has 84.4% of its population of about 190 million inhabitants living in areas considered urban areas.
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Julio César Lázaro da Silva
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP
Master in Human Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP
I. ( ) The I Industrial Revolution was characterized by the democratic way in which it occurred, distributing itself across all the major countries in the world, which have undergone marked urbanization rates in their cities.
II. ( ) Urbanization is a more recent process in underdeveloped countries due to the late industrialization of their economies.
III. ( ) The III industrial revolution was largely responsible for the urbanization of underdeveloped countries, as made possible the presence of foreign industries in these countries and raised the index of people looking for jobs in the cities.