Early industrial cities grew through rural immigration, never through 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
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader urban-theory reading: the claim that cities never grow via natural increase reframes the crowd dynamics Simmel and Lofland’s own earlier chapters describe—urban growth is always a stranger-flood.