By Daniel Nardini
In 2010, for the first time in human history, more people around the world lived in cities than in rural areas. This change is important for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason was that the majority of the world’s population were either born into urban and suburban areas or moved there because the quality of life is better in urban and suburban areas than in rural areas. In today’s world, the best hospitals, doctors and clinics can be found in urban and suburban areas. In today’s world one has a better chance of earning better wages in urban and suburban areas. Finally, the chances are higher that a person either born or raised in an urban and suburban area has a better chance of living a better material life than someone living in a rural area.
While this may be the new logic of today, it was not always the case. In the beginning of the industrial revolution (1750 and afterwards), city life was in fact more hard than rural life. This was especially true in Great Britain where the industrial revolution first began. In too many cases it could prove fatal. During the middle 18th Century, there were two serious outbreaks of smallpox in London. The outbreak was so bad that ten percent of the entire London population died and millions more were affected. Although smallpox was a similar scourge in the countryside, it killed nowhere near as many people because of the distances between neighbors and that smallpox could not spread as fast because villages were further spaced apart then.
But smallpox was not the only thing that killed people. Poor clean-up of garbage coupled with poor or non-existent sanitary conditions equally killed people in the cities at a young age. One other danger was industrial accidents. The early factories of the time had no safety procedures, and scores of men, women and children were killed in machines accidents. Just as equally bad was the industrial waste in the water supply system and on land that cut many lives short. These problems remained true for decades well into the year 1900. Conditions for working class people and especially the urban poor were so bad that newspaper articles and countless journalist investigations highlighted the horrible conditions of urban life for those who were just getting by.
Even now urban life can and is hell for so many hundreds of millions of people around the world, especially in the Third World. However, since 1900, a lot of this has changed and at least there is a conscious effort in many places around the world to improve the conditions for the urban poor. These changes have been among the reasons why so many people now would want to live in an urban environment than a rural one. The United States is no exception to this rule—only nine percent of all Americans still live in rural areas, and one percent are farmers. We have come a long way from when living in an urban area was a fatal calling card.
The Fatal Urban Life
By Daniel Nardini
In 2010, for the first time in human history, more people around the world lived in cities than in rural areas. This change is important for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason was that the majority of the world’s population were either born into urban and suburban areas or moved there because the quality of life is better in urban and suburban areas than in rural areas. In today’s world, the best hospitals, doctors and clinics can be found in urban and suburban areas. In today’s world one has a better chance of earning better wages in urban and suburban areas. Finally, the chances are higher that a person either born or raised in an urban and suburban area has a better chance of living a better material life than someone living in a rural area.
While this may be the new logic of today, it was not always the case. In the beginning of the industrial revolution (1750 and afterwards), city life was in fact more hard than rural life. This was especially true in Great Britain where the industrial revolution first began. In too many cases it could prove fatal. During the middle 18th Century, there were two serious outbreaks of smallpox in London. The outbreak was so bad that ten percent of the entire London population died and millions more were affected. Although smallpox was a similar scourge in the countryside, it killed nowhere near as many people because of the distances between neighbors and that smallpox could not spread as fast because villages were further spaced apart then.
But smallpox was not the only thing that killed people. Poor clean-up of garbage coupled with poor or non-existent sanitary conditions equally killed people in the cities at a young age. One other danger was industrial accidents. The early factories of the time had no safety procedures, and scores of men, women and children were killed in machines accidents. Just as equally bad was the industrial waste in the water supply system and on land that cut many lives short. These problems remained true for decades well into the year 1900. Conditions for working class people and especially the urban poor were so bad that newspaper articles and countless journalist investigations highlighted the horrible conditions of urban life for those who were just getting by.
Even now urban life can and is hell for so many hundreds of millions of people around the world, especially in the Third World. However, since 1900, a lot of this has changed and at least there is a conscious effort in many places around the world to improve the conditions for the urban poor. These changes have been among the reasons why so many people now would want to live in an urban environment than a rural one. The United States is no exception to this rule—only nine percent of all Americans still live in rural areas, and one percent are farmers. We have come a long way from when living in an urban area was a fatal calling card.