CROWDING OF CITIES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19423, 7 September 1937, Page 5

CROWDING OF CITIES

TREND OF POPULATION UNEVEN DISTRIBUTION (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, Sept. 4. In the course of an address to the geography section of the congress at Nottingham of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Edward Fawcelt discussed the changing distribution of the population of the world. The average density, he said, was 40 persons a square mile, and this density was exceeded only in Europe, Eastern and North America, the Far East and India, together with Ceylon. In these four regions three-fourths of the world's present estimated population of 2,000,000,000 was to be found on little more than one-eighth of the total land area. During the twentieth century the population of the inhabited lands on the margins of all four major populous regions had been increasing, and in North America this movement perhaps had overshot the climatic limits of good cultivable lands. India had made a real expansion on the newly-irrigated lands in the Indus Valley. Chinese and Russians Thirty millions and more of Chinese had pushed into Manchukuo and Inner Mongolia in the greatest of recent migrations. There has also been an eastward colonisation of Western Siberia from Russia, extending almost to Lake Baikal, which amounted, possibly, to 2,000.000. The net effect of the great migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not tended to spread the population more evenly over the earth, or 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 growing concentration of populations in urban areas and the great cities of the world. This drift to the towns, he said, was universal in countries that were affected by the modern Western civilisation. Between 1921 and 1931 the proportional increase in the London area was more than double the rate of increase for Great Britain. The numbers of these "million cities" and their inhabitants was increasing, so that in two or three generations, if the tendency were not checked, the majority of mankind might be found living in from 200 to 300 huge centres of population.