Early industrial cities grew only through rural in-migration, never natural increase.

Evidence

Under the onslaught of these hordes, untutored in, or unsympathetic to, city meanings and ways, the appearential order was shaken. For the fact is that these cities were certainly not growing because of a tremendous upsurge in the fertility of urban women. (Cities have never grown to any appreciable degree through an excess of births over deaths. Their birth rates are always too low, and in preindustrial and early industrial cities their death rates were always too high. See Peterson, 1961:Part II; Freedman [ed.], 1964.) No, these cities were growing because they were receiving massive influxes of rural populations. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 317

Categorization

• XREF: Bears on the composition of city populations in the Simmel/Lofland context — who the strangers flooding public space were.