POPULATION TRENDS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 59, 7 September 1937, Page 11

POPULATION TRENDS

THE URBAN DRIFT

INCREASING NUMBER OF "MILLION CITIES"

(British Official Wireless.)

RUGBY, September 5.

In the. geography section of the British Association meeting at Nottingham Professor Fawcett, of London, discussed the changing distribution of population. The average density throughout the world, he said, was 40 persons per square mile, and this density was exceeded only in Europe, Eastern North America, the Far East, and India and Ceylon. In these four regions threefourths of the world's present estimated population of 2,000,000,000 was to be found on a little more than oneeighth of the total land area.

During the twentieth century the population of inhabited lands on the margins of all the four major populous regions had been increasing and in North America this movement had perhaps overshot the climatic limits of good cultivable lands, the , professor said. India had made real expansion on the newly irrigated lands in the Indus Valley. Thirty million and more of Chinese had pushed into Manchukuo and Inner Mongolia in the greatest of recent migrations. There had also been eastward colonisation of. Western Siberia from Russia, extending almost to Lake Baikal, which amounted possibly to 2,000,000. ; CROWDING ACCENTUATED. ' :. The net effect of the great migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not tended to spread population more evenly over the earth or to fill up the great open spaces, but only to accentuate the crowding of mankind into already populous lands. Professor Fawcett dealt very fully with the marked and growing concentration of populations in the urban areas and great cities of the world. This drift to the towns, he said, was universal in countries affected by modern Western civilisation. Between 1921 and 1931 the proportional increases in the London area were more than double the rate of increase for Great Britain. The number of these "million cities", and of their inhabitants was increasing, so that in two or three generations, if the tendency was not checked, the majority of mankind might be found living in from 200 to 300 huge cities. , _ : ..