Urbanization occurs as individual, commercial flight, social and governmental efforts reduce time and expense in commuting and transportation and improve opportunities for jobs, education, housing, and transportation. Living in cities permits the advantages of the
opportunities of proximity, diversity, and marketplace competition. However, the advantages of urbanization are weighed against alienation issues, stress, increased daily life costs, and negative social aspects that result from mass marginalization. Suburbanization, which is happening in the cities of the largest developing countries, was sold and seen as an attempt to balance these negative aspects of urban life while still allowing access to the large extent of shared resources.
Cities are known to be places where money, services, wealth and opportunities are centralized. Many rural inhabitants come to the city for reasons of seeking fortunes and
social mobility. Businesses, which provide jobs and exchange capital are more concentrated in urban areas. Whether the source is trade or tourism, it is also through the ports or banking systems that foreign money flows into a country, commonly located in cities.
Economic opportunities are just one reason people move into cities, though they do not go to fully explain why urbanization rates have exploded only recently in places like China and India.
Rural flight is a contributing factor to urbanization. In rural areas, often on small family farms or collective farms in villages, it has traditionally been difficult to access manufactured goods, though overall
quality of life is very subjective, and may certainly surpass that of the city. Farm living has always been susceptible to unpredictable environmental conditions, and in times of drought, flood or pestilence, survival may become extremely problematic.
In a New York Times article concerning the acute migration away from farming in Thailand, life as a farmer was described as "hot and exhausting." "Everyone says the farmer works the hardest but gets the least amount of money". In an effort to counter this impression, the Agriculture Department of Thailand is seeking to promote the impression that farming is "honorable and secure".
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However, in Thailand, urbanization has also resulted in massive increases in problems such as obesity. City life, especially in modern urban slums of the developing world, is certainly hardly immune to pestilence or climatic disturbances such as floods, yet continues to strongly attract migrants. Examples of this were the 2011 Thailand floods and 2007 Jakarta flood. Urban areas are also far more prone to violence, drugs, and other urban social problems. In the case of the United States,
industrialization of agriculture has negatively affected the economy of small and middle-sized farms and
strongly reduced the size of the rural labour market.
Particularly in the developing world, conflict over land rights due to the effects of globalization has led to less politically powerful groups, such as farmers, losing or forfeiting their land, resulting in
obligatory migration into cities. In China, where land acquisition measures are forceful, there has been far more extensive and rapid urbanization (54%) than in India (36%), where peasants form militant groups (e.g. Naxalites) to oppose such efforts. Obligatory and unplanned migration often results in rapid growth of slums. This is also similar to areas of violent conflict, where people are driven off their land due to violence. Bogota, Colombia is one example of this.
Cities offer a larger variety of services, such as specialist services that aren't found in rural areas. Supporting the provision of these services requires workers, resulting in more numerous and varied job opportunities.
Elderly individuals may be forced to move to cities where there are doctors and hospitals that can
cater for their health needs. Varied and high quality educational opportunities are another factor in urban migration, as well as the opportunity to join, develop, and seek out social communities.
Urbanization also creates greater opportunities for women that are otherwise denied to them living in rural areas. This creates a gender-related transformation where women are engaged in paid employment and have access to education resulting in demographic implications in which fertility levels decline. However, women are still at a disadvantage due to their unequal position in the labour market, their inability to secure assets independently from male relatives and exposure to violence.
People located in cities are more productive than those working outside dense agglomerations. An important question for the policy makers as well as for clustering people deals with the causality of this relationship, that is whether people become more productive in cities due to certain
agglomeration effects or are cities
simply attracting those who are more productive. Economists have recently shown that there exists indeed a large productivity gain due to locating in dense agglomerations.
It is thus possible that agents locate in cities in order to benefit from these agglomeration effects
