POPULATION MOVES

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 198, 7 September 1937, Page 9

POPULATION MOVES

(British Official YVireless.)

■ » i Changing Distribution and Density DRIFT TO THE CITIES

BUGBY, Sept. 4. In the geography seetfon of the Brit- . ish Assoeiation meeting at Nottingham, Professor Fawcett, of London, discussed the changing distribution of the population of the world. The avorage density, he said, was 40 persons a square mile, and this density was exeeeded only in Europe, Eastern North America, the Ear East and India with Ceylon. In these four regions three-quartere of the world 's present estimated population of 2.000,000,000 was to he found on little more than one-eighth of the total land area. During the 20th Century the population that inhahited lands on the margins of all the four major populous regions had been increasing and in North America this movement, perhaps, overshot the elimatic limits of good, cultivable lands. India had made real expansion on the newly-irrigated lands in the Indus Yalley. Thirty millions and more of Chinese ihad pushed into Manehukuo and Inner Mongolia in the greatest of recent migrations. There had also been the^.eastward colonisation of Western Siberia from Kussia, extending almost to Lake Baikal, which amounted to possibly 2,000,000. The net effect of the great migrations of the 19th and 20th Centuries had not tended to spread the population more evenly over the earth or fijl up the great open spaces, but only to aceentuate the crowding of mankind into already populous lands. Professor Fawcett dealt very fnlly with the marked and growing concentration of population in the urban areas and great cities of the world. This drii't to the towns, he said, was universal in oountries affectcd hy modcrn western civilisation. Betweeu 1921 and 1931 the proportional increase in the London area was more than doublo tlie rate of increase for Great Britain. The numbers of these "million cities" and their inkabitants were increasing, so that in two or three generations, if the tendcnc-y was not checkod, the majority of mankind might be found living in from 200 to 309 coulU'batious,