Bienenhalde wrote:Adamede wrote:Rural populations have always been low, that’s why they’re rural. Cities really have nothing to do with it.
In pre-industrial societies, peasant-farmers were the majority of the population and only a minority of people lived in cities. That only really changed with the industrial revolution. Of course the industrial revolution did involve massive population growth, but the shift also was related to the mechanization of agriculture and the mass movement of rural people into cities to find jobs.
Cities, though, were the natural result of the specialization of labor, and have always been the centers of labor specialization since their invention; when fewer people needed to farm, they built cities, and that is where technological developments that have allowed for greater specialization happened, and so on and so on. Their constant growth and inevitably increasing share of the population is the result of specialization building on itself in an exponential fashion. This is why urbanization levels have been going up through almost all of modern history.
The industrial revolution was born in cities, not the other way around.