Rural flight

Rural flight (or rural exodus) is the migratory pattern of peoples from rural areas into urban areas. It is urbanization seen from the rural perspective.

In modern times, it often occurs in a region following the industrialization of agriculture—when fewer people are needed to bring the same amount of agricultural output to market—and related agricultural services and industries are consolidated. Rural flight is exacerbated when the population decline leads to the loss of rural services (such as business enterprises and schools), which leads to greater loss of population as people leave to seek those features.

This phenomenon was first articulated through Ernst Georg Ravenstein's Laws of migration in the 1880s, upon which modern theories are based.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, rural flight occurred in mostly localized regions. Pre-industrial societies did not experience large rural-urban migration flows primarily due to the inability of cities to support large populations. Lack of large employment industries, high urban mortality, and low food supplies all served as checks keeping pre-industrial cities much smaller than their modern counterparts. Ancient Athens and Rome, scholars estimate, had peak populations of 80,000 and 500,000 paling in comparison with their current populations.

The onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the late 19th century removed many of the checks that had previously constrained urban populations. As food supplies increased and stabilized and industrialized centers moved into place, cities began to support larger populations, sparking the beginning of rural flight on a massive scale. The United Kingdom went from having 20% of the population living in urban areas in 1800 to more than 70% by 1925. While the late 19th century and early 20th century saw much of rural flight focused in Western Europe and the United States, as industrialization spread throughout the world during the 20th century, rural flight and urbanization followed quickly behind. Today, rural flight is an especially distinctive phenomenon in some of the newer urbanized areas including China and more recently sub-Saharan Africa.

...
Wikipedia