The Zelinsky Model of Mobility Transition outlines 5 phases of population migration patterns within societies: Phase 1 is pre-urbanization with little migration and stable population. Phase 2 sees massive rural-to-urban migration during industrialization and rapid population growth. Phase 3 is characterized by declining rural-urban migration and increasing urban-urban movement. Phase 4 further reduces rural-urban shifts while intra-urban migration rises within an elaborate metropolitan network. Phase 5 predicts nearly all migration will be intra-urban with stable low fertility and mortality rates.

1. Zelinsky Model of
Mobility Transition
• Closely resembles Demographic Transition
Model
• Check out the relationship between
population growth and population migration

2. Phase one (“Premodern traditional society”): This is before the onset
of the urbanisation, and there is very little migration. Natural increase
rates are about zero.
Phase two (“Early transitional society”): There is “massive
movement from countryside to cities... as a community experiences
the process of modernisation”. There is “rapid rate of natural
increase”.
Phase three (“Late transitional society”): This phase corresponds to
the “critical rung...of the mobility transition” where urban-to-urban
migration surpasses the ruralto- urban migration, where rural-to-
urban migration “continues but at waning absolute or relative rates”,
and a “complex migrational and circulatory movements within the
urban network, from city to city or within a single metropolitan
region” increased, non-economic migration and circulation began to
emerge.

3. Phase four (“Advanced society”): The “movement from countryside
to city continues but is further reduced in absolute and relative
terms, vigorous movement of migrants from city to city and within
individual urban agglomerations...especially within a highly
elaborated lattice of major and minor metropolises” is observed.
There is “slight to moderate rate of natural increase or none at all”.
Phase five (“Future superadvanced society”): “Nearly all residential
migration may be of the interurban and intraurban variety….No
plausible predictions of fertility behaviour,...a stable mortality
pattern slightly below present levels”.