Rural flight (also known as rural-to-urban migration, rural depopulation, or rural exodus) is the migratory pattern of people from rural areas into urban areas. It is urbanization seen from the rural perspective.
In
push factors
.
The same phenomenon can also be brought about simply because of
pull factors
.
Once rural populations fall below a critical mass, the population is too small to support certain businesses, which then also leave or close, in a vicious circle. Even in non-market sectors of the economy, providing services to smaller and more dispersed populations becomes proportionately more expensive for governments, which can lead to closures of state-funded offices and services, which further harm the rural economy. Schools are the archetypal example because they influence the decisions of parents of young children: a village or region without a school will typically lose families to larger towns that have one. But the concept (urban hierarchy) can be applied more generally to many services and is explained by central place theory.
Government policies to combat rural flight include campaigns to expand services to the countryside, such as
exurbanization
. To some extent, governments generally seek only to manage rural flight and channel it into certain cities, rather than stop it outright as this would imply taking on the expensive task of building airports, railways, hospitals, and universities in places with few users to support them, while neglecting growing urban and suburban areas.
Historical trends
Prior to the
Ancient Athens and Rome, scholars estimate, had peak populations of 80,000 and 500,000.[2]
The onset of the
industrialization spread throughout the world during the 20th century, rural flight and urbanization followed quickly behind. In the early twenty-first century, rural flight was especially distinctive phenomenon in China and sub-Saharan Africa.[2][4]
Resource repletion and ecological factors: case study of the Dust Bowl in 1930s North America
The shift from mixed
subsistence farming to commodity crops and livestock began in the late 19th century. New capital market systems and the railroad network began the trend towards larger farms that employed fewer people per acre. These larger farms used more efficient technologies such as steel plows, mechanical reapers, and higher-yield seed stock, which reduced human input per unit of production.[5] The other issue on the Great Plains was that people were using inappropriate farming techniques for the soil and weather conditions. Most homesteaders
had family farms generally considered too small to survive (under 320 acres), and European-American subsistence farming could not continue as it was then practiced.
"Women leave in greater numbers than men. There is a glass ceiling for women everywhere, but in rural areas it tends to be made of thick steel." Hiroya Masuda, author of Japanese report on rural depopulation.[7]
Post-World War II rural flight has been caused primarily by the spread of
hog farmers in Iowa dropped from 65,000 in 1980 to 10,000 in 2002, while the number of hogs per farm increased from 200 to 1,400.[8]
The consolidation of the feed, seed,
processed grain
, and livestock industries has meant that there are fewer small businesses in rural areas. This decrease in turn exacerbated the decreased demand for labor. Rural areas that used to be able to provide employment for all young adults willing to work in challenging conditions, increasingly provide fewer opportunities for young adults. The situation is made worse by the decrease in services such as schools, business, and cultural opportunities that accompany the decline in population, and the increasing age of the remaining population further stresses the social service system of rural areas.
Abandonment of small towns
The rise of corporate agricultural structures directly affects small rural communities, resulting in decreased populations, decreased incomes for some segments, increased income inequality, decreased community participation, fewer retail outlets and less retail trade, and increased environmental pollution.[9]
Since the 1990s, China has merged schools into more centralized village-, town-, or county-level schools in rural areas to address some of these very problems.[10][11][12]
Determinants of rural flight
There are several determinants, push and pull, that contribute to rural flight: lower levels of (perceived) economic opportunity in rural communities versus urban ones, lower levels of government investment in rural communities, greater education opportunities in cities, marriages, increased social acceptance in urban areas, and higher levels of rural fertility.
Economic determinants
Some migrants choose to leave rural communities out of the desire to pursue greater economic opportunity in urban areas. Greater economic opportunities can be real or perceived. According to the
Harris-Todaro Model, migration to urban areas will continue as long as "expected urban real income at the margin exceeds real agricultural product" (127).[13] However, sociologist Josef Gugler points out that while individual benefits of increased wages may outweigh the costs of migration, if enough individuals follow this rationale, it can produce harmful effects such as overcrowding and unemployment on a national level.[14] This phenomenon, when the rate of urbanization outpaces the rate of economic growth, is known as overurbanization.[15] Since the industrialization of agriculture, mechanization has reduced the number of jobs present in rural communities. Some scholars have also attributed rural flight to the effects of globalization as the demand for increased economic competitiveness leads people to choose capital over labor.[16] At the same time, rural fertility rates have historically been higher than urban fertility rates.[2] The combination of declining rural jobs and a persistently high rural fertility rate has led to rural-urban migration streams. Rural flight also contains a positive feedback loop where previous migrants from rural communities assist new migrants in adjusting to city life. Also known as chain migration, migrant networks lower barriers to rural flight. For example, an overwhelming majority of rural migrants in China located jobs in urban areas through migrant networks.[17]
Some families choose to send their children to cities as a form of investment for the future. A study conducted by Bates and Bennett (1974) concluded that rural communities in Zambia that had other viable investment opportunities, like livestock for instance, had lower rates of rural-urban migration as compared to regions without viable investment opportunities. Sending their children into cities can serve as long-term investments with the hope that their children will be able to send remittances back home after getting a job in the city.[18]
Poorer people face severe challenges in the agricultural sector because of diminishing access to productive farmland. Foreign investors through Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) schemes have been encouraged to lease land in rural areas in Cambodia and Ethiopia. This has led to the loss of farmland, range land, woodlands and water sources from local communities. Large-scale agricultural projects funded by FDI only employed a few experts specialized in the relevant new technologies.[19]
Social determinants
In other instances, rural flight may occur in response to social determinants. A study conducted in 2012 indicated that a significant proportion of rural flight in India occurred due to social factors such as migration with household, marriage, and education. Migration with households and marriage affect women in particular as most often they are the ones required to move with households and move for marriage, especially in developing regions.[20]
Rural youth may choose to leave their rural communities as a method of transitioning into adulthood, seeking avenues to greater prosperity. With the stagnation of the rural economy and encouragement from their parents, rural youth may choose to migrate to cities out of social norms – demonstrating leadership and self-respect.[21] With this societal encouragement combined with depressed rural economies, rural youth form a large proportion of the migrants moving to urban areas. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a study conducted by Touray in 2006 indicated that about 15% (26 million) of urban migrants were youth.
Lastly, natural disasters can often be single-point events that lead to temporarily massive rural-urban migration flows. The 1930s Dust Bowl in the United States, for example, led to the flight of 2.5 million people from the Plains by 1940, many to the new cities in the West. It is estimated that as many as one out of every four residents in the Plains States left during the 1930s.[22] More recently, drought in Syria from 2006 to 2011 has prompted a rural exodus to major urban centers. Massive influxes in urban areas, combined with difficult living conditions, have prompted some scholars to link the drought to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria.[23]
Rural counties in the United States make up about 70 percent of the nation's land mass. Historically, population increase from births in rural areas more than compensated for the number of people moving from rural areas to urban areas, but from 2010 to 2016, rural areas lost population in absolute numbers for the first time.[24]
hukou system, greatly restricted the ability of their citizens to internally migrate. Since 1983, the Chinese government has progressively lifted the restrictions on internal migration. This has led to a great increase in the number of people migrating to urban areas.[25] However, even today, the hukou system limits the ability of rural migrants to receive full access to urban social services at the urban subsidized costs.[26]As with most examples of rural flight, several factors have led towards China's massive urbanization. Income disparity, family pressure, surplus labor in rural areas due to higher average fertility rates, and improved living conditions all play a role in contributing to the flows of migrants from rural to urban areas.[27] In 2014, approximately 250 million rural migrants lived in cities with 54% of the total Chinese population living in urban areas.[26]
England and Wales
A focus by landowners on efficient production led to the
enclosure of the commons in the 16th and 17th centuries.[28] This created unrest in rural areas as tenants were then unable to graze their livestock. They sometimes resorted to illegal means to support their families.[29] This was followed, in turn, by penal transportation which sent offenders out of the country, often Australia. Eventually, economic measures produced the British Agricultural Revolution.[30]
Germany
Middle ages
Rural flight has been occurring to some degree in Germany since the 11th century. A corresponding principle of German law is
Landflucht ("flight from the land") refers to the mass migration of peasants into the cities that occurred in Germany (and throughout most of Europe) in the late 19th century.
In 1870 the rural population of Germany constituted 64% of the population; by 1907 it had shrunk to 33%.[31] In 1900 alone, the Prussian provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Posen, Silesia, and Pomerania lost about 1,600,000 people to the cities,[32] where these former agricultural workers were absorbed into the rapidly growing factory labor class;[33] One of the causes of this mass-migration was the decrease in rural income compared to the rates of pay in the cities.[34]
Landflucht resulted in a major transformation of the German countryside and agriculture.
The word Landflucht has negative connotations in German, as it was coined by agricultural employers, often of the German aristocracy, who were lamenting their labor shortages.[33][36]
Rural flight and out-migration in Sweden can be traced in two distinct waves. The first, beginning in the 1850s when 82% of the Swedish population lived in rural areas, and continuing till the late 1880s, was mostly due to push factors in the countryside related to poverty, unemployment, low agricultural wages, debt peonage, semi-feudalism, and religious oppression by the State church. Most of the migration was ad-hoc and directed towards emigration to the three big cities of Sweden, America, Denmark, or Germany. Many of these first emigrants were unskilled, barely literate laborers who sought farm work or daily wage labour in the cities.
The second wave started from the late 1890s and reached its peak between 1922 and 1967, with the highest rates of rural flight occurring in the 1920s and the 1950s. This was mostly "pull factors" due to the economic boom and industrial prosperity in Sweden wherein the massive economic expansion and wage increases in the urban areas pulled young people to migrate for work and at the same time drove down work opportunities in the countryside. Between 1925 and 1965, Sweden's GDP per capita increased from US$850 to US$6200. Simultaneously, the percentage of the population living in rural areas decreased drastically from 54% in 1925 to 21% in 1965.