WORLD POPULATION

Wairarapa Daily Times, 7 September 1937, Page 5

WORLD POPULATION

CHANGING DISTRIBUTION THE DRIFT TO TOWNS. Press Association Electric Telesranb— ComrighS RUGBY, Monday. In the geography section of the British Association meeting at Nottingham Professor Fawcett, of London, discussed the changing distribution of population. The -vrorld average density, he said, was 40 persons per square mile, and this density was .exceeded only in Europe, Eastern North America, the Far East and India with Ceylon. In these four regions thre.e-fourtlis of the world’s present estimated population of 2,000,000,000 was to be found on a

little more than one-eightli 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 Maneliukuo 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 2,00,000.

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, bat only to accenuate the crowding of into,, already populous lands. Professor Fawcett dealt very fully with the .marked and 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 affected by modern Western civilisation. Between 1921 and 1931 the proportional increases in the London area was 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. —(British Wireless).