Rural flight
Rural flight is the migratory pattern of people from rural areas into urban areas. It is urbanization seen from the rural perspective. The pattern arises from an interplay of various push and pull factors and has occurred across history pushing states to employ multiple strategies to deal with the social and economic ramifications.
In industrializing economies like Britain in the eighteenth century or East Asia in the twentieth century, it can occur following the industrialization of primary industries such as agriculture, mining, fishing, and forestry—when fewer people are needed to bring the same amount of output to market—and related secondary industries are consolidated. Rural exodus can also follow an ecological or human-caused catastrophe such as a famine or resource depletion. These are examples of push factors.
People can also move into town to seek higher wages, educational access and other urban amenities; examples 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. Services to smaller and more dispersed populations may be proportionately more expensive, which can lead to closures of 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 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 electrification or distance education. Governments can also use restrictions like internal passports to make rural flight illegal. Economic conditions that can counter rural depopulation include commodities booms, the expansion of outdoor-focused tourism, and a shift to remote work, or 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.
In the 21st century states have adopted a plurality of strategies to counter this depopulation. Japans akiya programs, Ireland’s refurbishment grants for island housing, and Greece’s relocation stipends in order to repopulate said regions. Others used migration which matched rural employers facing labor shortages with immigrants similarly to Romania which also assists with housing and language learning.
Historical trends
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, rural flight occurred in mostly localized regions. Pre-industrial societies did not experience large rural-urban migration flows primarily due to the inability of cities to support large populations. Lack of large employment industries, high urban mortality, and low food supplies all served as checks keeping pre-industrial cities much smaller than their modern counterparts. Ancient Athens and Rome, scholars estimate, had peak populations of 80,000 and 500,000.The onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the late 19th century removed many of these checks. As food supplies increased and stabilized and industrialized centers arose, cities began to support larger populations, sparking the start of rural flight on a massive scale. This was often helped along by periodic agricultural recessions. The United Kingdom went from having 20% of the population living in urban areas in 1800 to more than 70% by 1925. While the late 19th century and early 20th century saw much of rural flight focused in Western Europe and the United States, as 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.
Mechanization and ecology: 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. 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, and European-American subsistence farming could not continue as it was then practiced.During the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s, large numbers of people fled rural areas of the Great Plains and the Midwest due to depressed commodity prices and high debt loads exacerbated by several years of drought and large dust storms. Rural flight from the Great Plains has been depicted in literature, as in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, in which a family from the Great Plains migrates to California, fleeing the Dust Bowl.
Since World War II
Post-World War II rural flight has been caused primarily by the spread of industrialized agriculture. Small, labor-intensive family farms have grown into, or have been replaced by, heavily mechanized and specialized industrial farms. While a small family farm typically produced a wide range of crop, garden, and animal products—all requiring substantial labor—large industrial farms typically specialize in just a few crop or livestock varieties, using large machinery and high-density livestock containment systems that require a fraction of the labor per unit produced. For example, Iowa State University reports the number 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.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.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.
Reasons for leaving
As with other human migration, various push and pull factors contribute to rural flight: lower levels of 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 motives
Some migrants choose to leave rural communities to pursue 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". 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. This phenomenon, when the rate of urbanization outpaces the rate of economic growth, is known as overurbanization. With the rise of industrial agriculture, mechanization has reduced the number of jobs 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. At the same time, rural fertility rates have historically been higher than urban fertility rates. 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.
Some families choose to send their children to cities as a form of investment for the future. A study conducted by Bates and Bennett 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.
Poorer people face severe challenges in the agricultural sector because of diminishing access to productive farmland. Foreign investors through Foreign Direct Investment 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.