Rural flight

Rural flight (also known as rural-to-urban migration, rural depopulation, or rural exodus) is the migratory pattern of people from rural areas into urban areas. It is urbanization seen from the rural perspective. The pattern arises from an interplay of various push and pull factors and has occurred across history pushing states to employ multiple strategies to deal with the social and economic ramifications. In industrializing economies like Britain in the eighteenth century or East Asia in the twentieth century, it can occur following the industrialization of primary industries such as agriculture, mining, fishing, and forestry—when fewer people are needed to bring the same amount of output to market—and related secondary industries (refining and processing) are consolidated. Rural exodus can also follow an ecological or human-caused catastrophe such as a famine or resource depletion. These are examples of push factors. People can also move into town to seek higher wages, educational access and other urban amenities; examples of pull factors. Once rural populations fall below a critical mass, the population is too small to support certain businesses, which then also leave or close, in a vicious circle. Services to smaller and more dispersed populations may be proportionately more expensive, which can lead to closures of offices and services, which further harm the rural economy. Schools are the archetypal example because they influence the decisions of parents of young children: a village or region without a school will typically lose families to larger towns that have one. But the concept (urban hierarchy) can be applied more generally to many services and is explained by central place theory. Government policies to combat rural flight include campaigns to expand services to the countryside, such as electrification or distance education. Governments can also use restrictions like internal passports to make rural flight illegal. Economic conditions that can counter rural depopulation include commodities booms, the expansion of outdoor-focused tourism, and a shift to remote work, or exurbanization. To some extent, governments generally seek only to manage rural flight and channel it into certain cities, rather than stop it outright as this would imply taking on the expensive task of building airports, railways, hospitals, and universities in places with few users to support them, while neglecting growing urban and suburban areas. In the 21st century states have adopted other strategies to counter this depopulation. They include Japan's akiya programs, Ireland’s refurbishment grants for island housing, and Greece’s relocation stipends in order to repopulate said regions. Others used migration (Canada’s Rural Community Immigration Pilot) which matched rural employers facing labor shortages with immigrants. Similarly, Romania also assists with housing and language learning.

Historical trends Prior to the Industrial Revolution, rural flight was usually localized. 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. The onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the late 19th century removed many of these checks. As food supplies increased and stabilized and industrialized centers arose, cities began to support larger populations, sparking massive rural flight. This was often helped along by periodic agricultural recessions. 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 in Western Europe and the United States, industrialization spread throughout the world during the 20th century, and rural flight and urbanization followed quickly behind. In the early twenty-first century, rural flight was especially intense in China and sub-Saharan Africa.

Mechanization and ecology: case study of the Dust Bowl in 1930s North America

The shift from mixed subsistence farming to commodity crops and livestock began in the late 19th century. New capital market systems and the railroad network began the trend towards larger farms that employed fewer people per acre. These larger farms used more efficient technologies such as steel plows, mechanical reapers, and higher-yield seed stock, which reduced human input per unit of production. The other issue on the Great Plains was that people were using inappropriate farming techniques for the soil and weather conditions. Most homesteaders had family farms generally considered too small to survive (under 320 acres), and European-American subsistence farming could not continue as it was then practiced. During the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s, large numbers of people fled rural areas of the Great Plains and the Midwest due to depressed commodity prices and high debt loads exacerbated by several years of drought and large dust storms. Rural flight from the Great Plains has been depicted in literature, as in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which a family from the Great Plains migrates to California, fleeing the Dust Bowl.

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