Demography Population Distribution

2. By: SUNSHINE D. ENAGUAS

3. INTRODUCTION
 Most know that China’s population numbers more than 1.3
billion, and the population of the United States is just over 300
million.
 However, many may not be aware that China and the United
States are very close in geographic size; China has 9.6 million
square kilometers of surface area compared to the United States
with 9.8 million square kilometers. But the populations in both
countries are not distributed randomly.
 In this chapter, we examine how the inhabitants of the world are
distributed, and how most of us are becoming city dwellers
rather than cave dwellers, as was the case thousands of years
ago.

4. Figure 11.2. Night time satellite map of China
Figure 11.1. Night time satellite map of the United States.

5.  Major Areas & Regions:
- Africa
- North America
- Asia
- Europe
- Oceania
 Table 11.1. South Central Asia (mainly
India) and East Asia (predominantly
China) are the most populated of the
world regions; Oceania (primarily
Australia) is the least.

6.  Table 11.2 informs us that by 2050,
India will have surpassed China as the
most populated nation in the world,
and this will mainly be the result of the
lower fertility of the Chinese.
 2030, China is expected to have 1.446
billion people, compared to 1.449
billion in India (United Nations, 2005)

7.  Regional or national population figures do not fully take
into account differences in the size of the areas.
 A better descriptive measure that demographers use is
population density, that is, the number of persons per
square mile (or square kilometer; a mile equals about 1.6
kilometers).

8. Figure 11.3. Population density in the world, 2000.

9. Figure 11.3
 We show in Figure 11.3 the
distribution in population
density (persons per square
kilometer) for the world in
2000.
 The world’s population density
is 45 persons per square
kilometer.
 Several countries with large
populations have densities
higher than 250 persons per
square kilometer, namely, South
Korea at 444, Japan at 327, and
India at 274.
 Countries with densities higher
than 2,000 persons per square
kilometer are usually city-
states; examples are Monaco at
31,000, Macao at 21,560, and
Singapore at 4,650.
 The population density of the
United States in 2000 was 30.
 East Asia is the most densely
settled, and the most
populated, of all the regions in
the world.

10.  The measure of population
density just discussed is a
crude measure because it
divides the number of persons
in the population by the
number of square kilometers
(or miles) of territory in the
country or area.
 Physiological (or nutritional)
measure of population
density - is calculated by
dividing the number of
persons in the country by the
country’s quantity of arable
land (in square kilometers or
miles).

11.  Many factors influence the distribution of the population.
 These include geographic factors (climate, terrain and soils,
and natural resources); economic, social, and political factors
(the type of economic activity and the form of social
organization); and demographic factors (mainly the rates of
population change due to the three demographic processes
of fertility, mortality, and migration).
 These factors continue to contribute to the distribution of the
world’s population, some more than others.

12. RESIDENTIAL DISTRIBUTION AND URBANIZATION
 The economy of rural areas tends to be overwhelmingly agricultural.
The economy of an urban area is more likely to be diversified and
nonagricultural. Sociologists have long pointed out that lifestyles
differ in rural and urban places.
 Emile Durkheim labeled them as mechanical and organic; that is, in
rural areas, behavior and relationships more or less follow
mechanical rules and approaches. Roles are not complex and are few
in number. In contrast, in urban areas the roles are many, and there
is a division of labor leading to an “organic” lifestyle, that is, one with
increasing complexities and differences.

13.  Throughout most of history, humans have been rural dwellers.
Even after the Agricultural Revolution, most people were still
“living on the farm.”
 It was really not until the Industrial Revolution that true
urbanization began to occur, especially in the countries of
Western Europe and their colonies.
 Thus, large-scale urbanization – or changes in the proportion of
people that dwells in cities – is a modern development. It should
not be confused with urbanism, which is a reflection of lifestyle
and is a sociological, not a demographic, term.

14.  China is the country with the longest urban tradition of
any country in the world. Cities made their first
appearance in China more than two thousand years ago.
 For most of the thousand years between 800 and 1800,
China was unsurpassed by any country in the world in
both the number and size distribution of its cities.

15. Three conditions must always be present for urbanization, and
cities, to develop.
 First, there must be a surplus of farm products. That is, farmers must
produce more than is needed for their own subsistence.
 Second, there must be a means of transporting these products to
the urban areas, where they may be processed into items of food,
clothing, and shelter.
 Third, there must be a sufficiently developed technology in the
urban areas to use the farm products and to provide employment
for the urban dweller.

16.  The United States serves as an example of how the impacts of the
Industrial Revolution contributed to the growth of cities.
 The first large and important cities thus were all water based, namely,
Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston, South Carolina. The
latter was among the ten largest cities in the nation in 1800, due
primarily to the cotton industry and the acrimonious slave trade.
 A little later, Chicago and Detroit emerged, mainly because of their
locations on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. New Orleans
was another early city, the result of its location near the mouth of the
Mississippi River.
 Then came the railroad era in the nineteenth century, opening up
more areas for urban growth.

17.  The automobile and the construction of the interstate highway system
also contributed to this urban growth.
 Another recent contributor is the airline system with its hubs. On a
smaller dimension, consider that wherever two interstate highways
intersect, fast-food restaurants and hotel chains open for business and
more residents move in.
 Joel Garreau (1991) has referred to so-called edge cities. New
“cities”actually are formed at the edges of metropolitan areas to
better serve those residing ever more remotely from the true central
cities (a central city being the largest city in an area).

18.  Later, as technological and economic changes made possible large
agricultural surpluses, people began migrating to the cities in
search of jobs in the factories.
 In 2007, half of all the world’s inhabitants were classified as urban
residents. Recent urbanization has been especially marked in the
developing regions.
 Urbanization refers to an increase in the percent of a region’s or
country’s population living in an urban area; Urban growth refers
to an increase in the number of people living in urban areas.

19.  Table 11.3 presents population data
for the twenty largest urban
agglomerations in the world; all
have populations of more than 10
million.
 The UN has defined an urban
agglomeration as an urban area of
at least 1 million inhabitants,
including all inhabitants in the
surrounding territory living in urban
levels of residential density.

20. ECONOMIC DISTRIBUTION
 Another way to classify the distribution of the world’s
population is to classify people according to the level of
economic development of their country of residence.
 Two common measures are:
1) per capita income,
2) per capita energy consumption.
 Less than 20 percent of the population of the world resides in
the more economically developed regions.

21.  The small proportion of one-fifth of the world’s population living in the
more economically developed regions is expected to decline in future
years. By 2050, it may well be below 15 percent.
 This is projected to occur because the rates of population growth are
much higher in the developing than in the developed nations.
 Massive migration from developing regions into the developed regions is
unlikely because of political barriers erected by the latter to prevent
such international movements.
 Most undocumented immigrants are moving from the less-developed
countries of the world to the more-developed and richer countries.

22. DISTRIBUTION OF THE UNITED STATES POPULATION
 Table 11.4 shows
population data
for each of the
four geographic
regions of the
United States for
1970 and 2000.