When you go to buffet lunch there are several food stalls which are spread across but when you take the plate and take all the food from stalls all types of food comes into the plate, this plate can be compared to an urban area and all food stalls can be compared to rural and semi-urban areas. Just like all food came into the plate from different food stalls in the same way people from various rural and semi-urban areas come into urban areas which is called urbanization. Urbanization refers to that process in which a large number of people move from rural and semi-urban areas to urban areas. In order to understand about urbanization better let’s look at some of the important features of urbanization –
- The first and foremost feature of urbanization is that majority of times it happens due to the migration of people from rural and semi-urban areas to urban areas and not because of natural increase in population in urban areas.
- Another important characteristic is that it happens due to people coming in urban areas in search of better employment opportunities because of non-availability of jobs in rural and semi-urban areas. Hence if there are good job opportunities available in rural and semi-urban areas then there will not be any problem of urbanization.
- Another feature of urbanization is that industrialization is the reason due to which urbanization happens as people will not come in big cities to do agriculture related activities. People come in urban areas to work in industries and service sector related jobs.
- It leads to many problems for people living in big cities like pollution, an increase in criminal activities due to the big gap between rich and poor, development of slums, lack of proper hygiene, possibility of contagious diseases and many other problems.
- It also leads to fall in agriculture output of the country because since so many people move out of the rural area which is the hub for agriculture activities and due to this agriculture produce of the country falls as there are less number of workers for doing agriculture activities.
- Another feature of urbanization is that it helps the country in removing age old beliefs and superstitions because in big metros thrust is on imparting education to all without any prejudice and education tend to make people more civilized and less superstitious.
As one can see from the above that urbanization has many unique characteristics and it is quite similar to the ocean while in the case of ocean many rivers flow into the ocean to make it a big in the same way many people come from small cities and village to make a metro city even bigger.