What do the city and the countryside owe each other?
More of the world’s people now live in towns than in the country, and the share keeps shifting. What does a city owe the fields that feed it, and what does the countryside owe the people who leave it?
The picture
What the numbers show, read from the Data library each time the page opens.
How to read the chart above, and the words it uses (for living in towns and cities).
How to read the data
The figure is the share of a country’s people who live in places that country counts as urban. Countries draw that line differently, so a comparison between countries is approximate.
Key terms
Urbanisation
A rise in the share of people living in towns and cities.
Urban area
A place a country defines as a town or city, usually by size or density.
Rural
Living outside towns and cities, in villages and open country.
Who has a stake
Each interest, then readings from the Catholic library and the Classics library that bear on it, oldest first. Choose a group to read.
A living from the land or from work nearby, schools and care within reach, and the choice to stay or go without being driven out.
Work, housing, clean air and water, transport and neighbours, in places that have grown faster than they could be planned.
A fair price for what they grow, secure use of the land, and the labour to work it, without large holdings pushing out the small.
Exchange between town and country on fair terms, so that food flows one way and manufactured goods and services the other to the benefit of both.
For discussion
When people leave the countryside for the city, what does each owe the other: the city to the fields that feed it, and the country to those who go?
How should the interests of small farmers be weighed against those of the cities that depend on cheap food?
A city is more than a place to work, and a village more than a place to be left. What would it mean for each to be a place to live well?
