This UN report (2018) on urbanization trends is a fascinating way to understand how our world is growing and changing. So today's post is about some of my takeaways. If you have others, feel free to add them to the comment section below.
But first, some definitions.
The UN report considers 3 ways to measure the size of a city, all of which we have used before on this blog. The first is the "city proper." That is the current administrative boundary of a city. The second is the "urban agglomeration" area, which is a city's contiguous built-up area. And the third is the "metropolitan area," which is the approximate area of economic and social interconnectedness.
More and more people are moving to cities. This much we know. But in our fast paced world, census data is becoming increasingly limited in its ability to tell us exactly where and how people are moving.
Thankfully we now have Facebook.
I just discovered a fascinating study conducted by the Facebook Data Science Team called “Coordinated Migration." What they did was anonymously analyze every Facebook user that has inputted both a hometown and a current city to see where people of a particular hometown are most likely to live, today.
But more specifically, the study is looking at coordinated flows, rather than just total flows to a particular city. A “coordinated migration” is defined as an instance where “a significant proportion of the population of a city has migrated, as a group, to a different city.”
What the study found (perhaps not surprisingly) was that the vast majority of coordinated migrations are happening in countries that are in the midst of rapid urbanization. It’s a case of people moving within the country to its largest city.
Here are the top coordinated migration destinations:
If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of how they actually computed the coordinated migrations,
