Impact of the Industrial Revolution

This general model of city structure continued until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, although medieval towns were rarely as large as Rome. In the course of time, commerce became an increasingly important part of city life and one of the magnets that drew people from the countryside. With the invention of the mechanical clock, the windmill and water mill, and the printing press, the interconnection of city inhabitants continued apace. Cities became places where all classes and types of humanity mingled, creating a heterogeneity that became one of the most celebrated features of urban life. In 1777 Samuel Johnson cheered this aspect of cities in his famous apothegm, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” At the time, it should be recalled, London had fewer than 100,000 citizens, and most of its streets were narrow, muddy paths.

The United Kingdom is a useful illustration of the extent to which the Industrial Revolution impacted urban areas. In 1801 about one-fifth of the population of the United Kingdom lived in towns and cities of 10,000 or more inhabitants. By 1851 two-fifths were so urbanized, and, if smaller towns of 5,000 or more are included, as they were in the census of that year, more than half the population could be counted as urbanized. The world’s first industrial society had become its first truly urban society as well. By 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, the census recorded three-quarters of the population as urban (two-thirds in cities of 10,000 or more and half in cities of 20,000 or more). In the span of a century a largely rural society had become a largely urban one. The pattern was repeated on a European and then a world scale as industrialization proceeded.

The technological explosion that was the Industrial Revolution led to a momentous increase in the process of urbanization. Larger populations in small areas meant that the new factories could draw on a big pool of workers and that the larger labour force could be ever more specialized. By the 19th century there were thousands of industrial workers in Europe, many of them living in the most miserable conditions. Attracted by the promise of paid work, immigrants from rural areas flooded into cities, only to find that they were forced to live in crowded, polluted slums awash with refuse, disease, and rodents. Designed for commerce, the streets of the newer cities were often arranged in grid patterns that took little account of human needs, such as privacy and recreation, but did allow these cities to expand indefinitely.

Modern growth

By concentrating large numbers of workers and their families in cities, industrialism ultimately led to modern life being unquestionably urban life for a vast majority of the world’s population. Through the 20th and in the 21st century, continued economic development and population growth fueled the generation of megalopolises—concentrations of urban centres that may extend for scores of miles. Examples of this phenomenon have appeared in the United States, on the northeastern seaboard and along the coast of southern California among other areas. Other megalopolises include the Tokyo–Ōsaka–Kyōto complex in Japan, the region between London and the Midland cities in Great Britain, and the Netherlands–central Belgium area. See also urban planning.