EVER-GROWING CITIES

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 8 October 1936, Page 12

EVER-GROWING CITIES

Greater Paris now has a population of over 6,000,000; in 1846 the city itself had only a million, and in 1801, when in Europe Paris was still pre-eminently “la grande ville,” only 547,000. This, says the “Manchester Guardian,” merely displays once more to-day’s general urge toward urbanisation. Cobbett’s “great wens” now pullulate on almost every horizon. In Britain alone there are seven of what someone has called “conurbations” (lovely word!) with a population of a million or over. At the 1931 census Greater London had a population of 8,202,000. but the real “conurbation,” if you fling in the outlying urban tentacles, has been estimated at 10,000,000. This is about equal to the number of people living within 50 miles of Manchester. Within 100 miles of Manchester today, it is calculated, there are as many white people as in the whole of the British Empire outside Britain, and that includes such of the world’s largest cities as Sydney and Melbourne, each with round about a million. For the world as a whole there are extraordinary figures showing the extent

of to-day’s urbanisation. Not counting China or Russia, and some other countries, at least 248,000,000 people now live in towns or cities of some sort; 780,000,000 are country dwellers. The world is on its way to become one vast city, which must be a good thing, if cities also mean civilisation.