Population Distribution, Urbanization and Migration

Abstract

Certain themes in demographic analysis have a distinctly geographic dimension to them, and geographers not surprisingly have taken particular interest in them. This is not the place for a review of the development and contemporary nature of population geography (Jones 1990; Newbold 2010). Nor does one wish to create the impression that themes addressed in this chapter represent anything like the totality of the demographic issues and phenomena in which geographers take an interest. But the geographic (or ‘spatial’) distribution of population, the movement of population between geographic locations (variously mobility and migration), and the process of urbanization, to which population redistribution by migration invariably is fundamental, are all inherently geographic, and hence clearly of central concern to geographers.