Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- By studying population trends and forecasting models, researchers have come to believe that nearly 15,000 U.S. cities will face noticeable depopulation by 2100.
- Populated areas of the cities in question could experience a decline of up to 44 percent.
- Projections call for the biggest drops in city populations to occur in the Northeast and Midwest.
If it’s a shift from a labour-intensive agrarian economy, that’s to be expected. A similar thing happened in Iceland, and due to the small scale of the country, it is very noticeable. Some 2/3 of the population live in the greater capital area, and beyond that, the countryside is dotted with abandoned farmsteads slowly falling apart.
This has nothing to do with the agrarian transition. These depopulating cities were created by the agrarian transition. They were where people went after they left the rural areas.