Urbanization

As an export processing zone with plenty of cheap labor and land, national, regional, and local governments have made enormous investments in transportation and communication infrastructure to make it competitive and more prominent in the global economy.

So the open-door policy, the industrialization of the Pearl River Delta, and the government investment all accelerated the region's urbanization, or the shift in residents of population from rural to urban areas.

As urban geographers, we take skills from both physical and human geography, and a bunch of other fields, to study the way people and economies move between rural and urban living.

So we care about urbanization for the same reasons we care about why people migrate, because it means a change to the structure of the human experience.

And worldwide, urbanization is kinda on the rampage.

The UN estimates that by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population will be urbanized.

And that's the inverse of how it was just a century ago, when less than one-third lived in cities.

Unlike countries which are defined by their borders, cities are economic entities geographically defined by their connections.