Urbanization in Bangladesh

The urban transition has been one of the most important changes taking place in the context of the overall demographic transition of the past two centuries. But, despite its role in remaking human society, it rarely gets into the news in any real way. That's why the headline from this week's Economist caught my eye: "Urbanization in  Bangladesh: Life after Dhaka."

In 1974 just 9% of Bangladeshis lived in towns or cities. Today 37% of the country’s 170m people do. In a few decades more than half will. The capital, Dhaka, which attracts the majority of rural migrants, has grown from 3m in 1980 to 18m today. It is “already bursting at the seams”, says Saleemul Huq of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, a think-tank trying to bolster education and employment in eight places, including Mongla, to help absorb migrants.

Mongla is a small city of 40,000 people whose mayor wants some, or a lot, of those people going to Dhaka to move instead to Mongla, which is about an 8-hour drive south of Dhaka. Why might they be tempted to do that? At least partly because the description of living conditions in Dhaka is reminiscent of European cities in the 19th century.

According to an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to The Economist, Dhaka, notorious for traffic jams and pollution, is the world’s third-least liveable city. Some 60% of residents live in makeshift structures, according to the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS), another think-tank. Many of these slum-dwellers lack access to clean water and sanitation and are at constant risk of eviction. 

In such conditions diseases—especially waterborne ones—thrive. Frequent bouts of illness that stop slum-dwellers from working keep them trapped in poverty, says Abdus Shaheen of Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor, an NGO. “This, of course, hampers the wider economy, too,” he adds.

The government is working on the problem, including a program to bring better living conditions to rural residents so that they will stay down on the farm. As China found out, however, that is very unlikely to work. Building better cities is the long-term answer.

Visualizing the Changing Urban Population

I happen to really like 3D maps. I think that they are terrific visualization tools, and so I was very pleased when Todd Gardner pointed us to a new set of such maps created by the Human Terrain project at Pudding, and yesterday summarized by Nick Routley at the Visual Capitalist. Here, for example, is the map for Dallas, Texas, showing the change in population at the local level between 1990 and 2015:

The green bars represent population increase over time, showing that the northern suburbs are where the metro area has. been growing. This helped explain to me why there is now a Frisco Bowl, where my San Diego State Aztecs will play the Ohio Bobcats next week. I've been in and out of Dallas many times over the years, but had not paid attention to those northern suburbs until I saw this map. And, while you might think that a 3D map should show a hole where there is population decline, these maps put the negative growth in red instead of green. Thus, you can see that the southern suburbs of Dallas have experienced a loss of population since 1990. My late father-in-law was born in Seagoville, just off the map below Mesquite, and I don't think he would be surprised at that demographic change.

Suicide Rates are Declining Globally, But Not in the U.S.

This week's Economist has a very nice summary of the global trends in suicide (or "intentional self-harm" as it is known in the International Classification of Diseases). In the world as a whole, the rates are declining, but the United States is bucking that trend.

Globally, the rate has fallen by 38% from its peak in 1994. As a result, over 4m lives have been saved—more than four times as many people as were killed in combat over the period. The decline has happened at different rates and different times in different parts of the world. In the West, it started long ago: in Britain, for instance, the male rate peaked at around 30 per 100,000 a year in 1905, and again at the same level in 1934, during the Great Depression; among women it peaked at 12 in 1964. In most of the West, it has been flat or falling for the past two decades.

America is the big exception. Until the turn of the century the rate there dropped along with those in other rich countries. But since then, it has risen by 18% to 12.8—well above China’s current rate of seven. The declines in those other big countries, however, far outweigh the rise in America.

There are a couple of important reasons for the global decline--urbanization and women's liberation. Although in most societies men (especially older men) tend to have the highest suicide rates, in China and India (the world's two most populous countries), the burden of suicide was often on women trapped in a relationship and family that was not of their choosing. Indeed, a few years ago I blogged about the fact that urbanization in China seemed to be lowering their suicide rate.

The graph below, based on data from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, compares the recent trends among several countries, and you can the U.S. pattern is different from the global pattern:

In the U.S., we have two important things that contribute to the rise, and I've blogged about both in the past: (1) the "sea of despair" that has taken root especially among white working class Americans; and (2) the availability of guns. Both of these are within the purview of public policy, and the lack of legislative initiatives on these underlying contributors to suicide almost certainly explains the rise in the rate of suicides in the U.S.

Demographics of Homelessness

Voters in San Francisco today will decide the fate of a local proposition aimed at coping with the growing number of homeless persons in that city. Indeed, homelessness is generally on the rise in California, and Los Angeles passed a proposition two years ago to deal with the issue. Although there are a variety of causes, a NYTimes story adds a new wrinkle:

Dennis Culhane, an expert on homelessness at the University of Pennsylvania, says there is also a much more unappreciated factor: demographics.

The current acute homelessness crisis in cities across California corresponds with the coming-of-age of the millennial generation, which at its peak in the mid-1990s had more births than at any time since the baby boomers of the 1950s and ’60s. A previous bout of severe homelessness came in the 1980s, when the second half of the baby boomers were in their 20s.

What does demography say about the future of homelessness in California?

Nationally, births declined for seven years from the millennial generation peak of 4.2 million. There may be some hope in that. Yet the millennial cohort will be with us for decades longer — and Dr. Culhane believes it will take a “massive infusion of resources” to assist the neediest among them. “At the scale of homelessness we are witnessing on the West Coast, little pilot efforts here and there are not going to make a dent,” he said.

There is also a state-wide initiative on the ballot--Proposition 10--that would allow widespread rent control in an attempt to keep rents from rising to the point that people are forced out of their homes--and thus into a state of homelessness. Rising rents and rising income inequality in California are also creating demographic pressures in the state. This is yet another good example of demography as "a drama in slow motion."  Stay tuned!

More Demographic Resources at the Local Level

Thanks to Meredith Gerhardt for linking me to a great source of data about communities in the U.S., based on a compilation of data largely drawn from the Census Bureau. It's called Data USA and it is funded by Deloitte Touche, a global consulting firm. Here's the background they provide:

In 2014, Deloitte, Datawheel, and Cesar Hidalgo, Professor at the MIT Media Lab and Director of Collective Learning, came together to embark on an ambitious journey -- to understand and visualize the critical issues facing the United States in areas like jobs, skills and education across industry and geography. And, to use this knowledge to inform decision making among executives, policymakers and citizens.

Data USA puts public US Government data in your hands. Instead of searching through multiple data sources that are often incomplete and difficult to access, you can simply point to Data USA to answer your questions. Data USA provides an open, easy-to-use platform that turns data into knowledge. It allows millions of people to conduct their own analyses and create their own stories about America – its people, places, industries, skill sets and educational institutions. Ultimately, accelerating society’s ability to learn and better understand itself.

The opening page puts the data at your fingertips when you type in a place name:

When you add this to the OpportunityAtlas.org set of data and the USALEEP neighborhood life expectancy project, your ability to know about local demographics and to compare your place with others is all of a sudden genuinely amazing.

Is the World More Urban Than We Thought?

I spend a lot of time at the beginning of my chapter on "The Urban Transition" on the ways in which "urban" is defined around the world. Indeed, we usually think of it as a dichotomy between urban and rural, whereas I suggest we really should think of it as a continuum or a gradient. One of my recent PhD students, Dr. Magdalena Benza, implemented such a measure using our data for Ghana and a paper from that research was published last year in the journal Population, Space and Place. The United Nations Population Division tends to define urban as a dichotomy based on the definitions of urban used by member nations. By those criteria the world's population is currently more than 50% urban and will be about 2/3 urban by the middle of this century.

But, wait a minute! What if those estimates by the UN are too low? Thanks to another of my former PhD students, Dr. Debbie Fugate, for linking me to an article today from Reuters discussing the European Commission's new methodology for defining urban populations based on the classification of satellite data. Now, to be sure, the headline of this piece--a quote from the European Commission researchers--is a bit dramatic: "Everything we've heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong." That's a bit of an exaggeration, but the use of satellite imagery does give us a different perspective, as I and my colleagues have seen, and as a good friend of mine, Dr. Deborah Balk at CUNY has also been discovering for a long time.

Using a definition made possible by advances in geospatial technology that uses high-resolution satellite images to determine the number of people living in a given area, they estimate 84 percent of the world's population, or almost 6.4 billion people, live in urban areas.

"Everything we've heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong," said lead researcher Lewis Dijkstra.

Asia and Africa, which are routinely cited as majority-rural continents that are rapidly urbanizing, turn out to be well ahead of figures in the U.N.'s latest estimates. Once thought to be about 50 percent and 40 percent urban respectively, the new research argues Asia and Africa are closer to 90 percent and 80 percent, or roughly double previous estimates.

Those percentages translate to billions of additional people living in cities and urban areas, such as towns and suburbs, than previously thought. "If this is true, the impact is going to be massive," Dijkstra said. "A lot of development aid was geared toward rural."

The reason for the past errors is simple, Dijkstra said, because countries self-report their demographic statistics to the U.N. and they use widely different standards.

So, the researchers at the EC derived their own consistent definition: 

According to the European Commission definition, any contiguous stretch with at least 50,000 people and a population density of 1,500 per square km is considered an urban center. Any area with at least 5,000 people and a population density of 300 per square km is classified an urban cluster. Rural areas are those with less than 300 people per square km.

You can appreciate, of course, that you can't actually count people from satellite images, so you're going to need census and/or survey data to go along with that. There's a lot of work involved here, and you can check out the European Commission's database here. You can also make your own comparisons with the UN data, which are found here. Keep me posted on what you find out!

Urban Population of the World Projected to Increase by 2.5 Billion by Mid-Century

Thanks to Todd Gardner for the link to a report released today from the UN Population Division detailing their new projections of the urban population.

By 2050, two out of every three people are likely to be living in cities or other urban centres, according to a new United Nations report, highlighting the need for more sustainable urban planning and public services.

Most of the increase is expected to be highly-concentrated in just a handful of countries. “Together, India, China and Nigeria will account for 35 per cent of the projected growth of the world’s urban population between 2018 and 2050…It is projected that India will have added 416 million urban dwellers, China 255 million and Nigeria 189 million,” said DESA, announcing the findings on Wednesday.

By 2028, the Indian capital, New Delhi, is projected to become the most populous city on the planet. Currently, Tokyo is the world’s largest, with an agglomeration of 37 million inhabitants, followed by New Delhi (29 million), and Shanghai (26 million). Mexico City and São Paulo, come next; each with around 22 million inhabitants.

As the report suggests, these projections imply a tremendous demand for services to meet the needs of these new (and current) urban residents in a sustainable manner--shelter, food, water, sanitation, education, law enforcement, and of course jobs, many of which will be focused precisely on servicing those needs. This will be simultaneously a challenge and an opportunity, and guarantees that the world will be a different place at mid-century than it is now.

The Economy of Cities Helped Drive 19th Century Urbanization

Philippe Bocquier and Sandra Bree have just published an article in Demographic Research that takes us back to 19th century France in search of the major drivers of the early parts of the urban transition in that country. Consistent with what you already know from my book, the death rates in urban places in France in the 19th century were higher than in the countryside, while the urban birth rates were a bit lower (although even in rural areas the birth rate was dropping in the mid to late 19th century in France). So, the rate of natural increase was lower in cities than outside of cities, and it was clearly the economic attraction of the cities that led people in rural places to migrate to the cities.

As I read the article (which is very dense with a lot of discussion about data, methods, and results) I couldn't help but think back to the trip that my wife and I made to Denmark a couple of years ago, in which we visited the rural village where her maternal grandfather had been born and raised late in the 19th century (the village of Tranekaer, on Langeland--an island about a two-hour drive from Copenhagen). We actually found the thatched roof house where he was born, because one of her uncles had been there right after WWII (he had been stationed in Germany), and we knew what we were looking for. It seemed like a good-sized house, but the local historian showed us the census forms for a year close to when he was born and we confirmed her suspicion that several families were sharing the house. Indeed, she told us unequivocally that it was rural poverty that drove people to migrate. Cities were an obvious choice, because they were just ramping up their level of economic activity in the 19th century, but for many Scandinavians the choice was rural America. A woman at a local shop told us that every summer she is visited by Americans whose family members migrated from Denmark to the upper midwest of the U.S. to start a new life, which is exactly what my wife's grandfather and his family did--moving to South Dakota where they became successful farmers. 

Anyway, thanks to Philippe Bocquier and Sandra Bree for a very nice research article and for triggering that trip down memory lane!!

Dr. Fugate Visits From Washington, DC

This coming Friday, the Geography Department at San Diego State University will be hosting one of its illustrious alums--Dr. Debbie Fugate, from the U.S. State Department.

Dr. Debbie Fugate is the Deputy Director of the Office of The Geographer and Global Issues in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. Department of State. The office provides timely, independent analysis on a range of global issues to inform foreign policy decisions. She co-directs the research and analysis of the office, including work on civilian security, health and environment, human rights, migration and refugees, trafficking, and war crimes. She reports directly to The Geographer of the United States, a position that was established in 1921 and bears the statutory responsibility for providing guidance to all federal agencies on international boundaries and sovereignty.

Debbie oversees the Humanitarian Information Unit (HIU), an interagency unit that produces written and visual analytics on humanitarian challenges and complex emergencies worldwide. The HIU employs geographic methods and technologies, serves as an information-sharing node, and manages projects that facilitate the creation of geospatial data. She is also Director of the Secondary Cities Initiative, a field-based program that engages communities to build capacity in geospatial science and open data with partnerships addressing disaster preparedness and urban resiliency in secondary cities globally.

You'll know from my past posts (here's the most recent) that she and I co-edited a volume on The Youth Bulge: Challenge or Opportunity?, as well as a variety of papers and chapters. We are happy to have her "back home" for this talk (with reception to follow). Please join us if in you're in the area!

Will Diverse Demographics Drive America's Future?

William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution (and also a long-time Research Professor at the University of Michigan) has written extensively over the past several years about the growing demographic diversity of the millennial generation (people moving into young adulthood early here in the 21st century). A few days ago he posted a nice summary of his recent research on the Brookings website. He notes first that, among millennials, 44% are minorities (i.e., something other than non-Hispanic white). Secondly, there is a distinct spatial pattern to this demographic diversity.

Millennial diversity is especially evident in the core areas of America’s largest metropolitan areas (see Figure 1).

That is, nearly three-fifths of millennials residing in core urban counties are racial minorities, where more than a quarter are Hispanic, 18 percent are black, and the rest other races. Mature, largely inner-suburb millennials are only slightly less white—52 percent—than the national millennial population. But in emerging suburbs and exurbs, whites are far more prevalent at 62 percent and 72 percent, respectively. Suburban categories get less diverse as distance from the core increases.

The spatial pattern is not just a function of distance from the city center. There is also a geographic difference around the country, in which the most prominent feature is a north-south divide--with greater diversity in the southern part of the country than in the northern part (regardless of whether you are east or west). 

These changing demographics are obviously part of the story behind the contentious politics in the U.S. The question in my mind is how long will it take for today's racial/ethnic minorities to simply be part of the mainstream? Over the past century the country has witnessed immigrant groups such as Italians move into the mainstream, and we have seen religious groups such as Catholics and Jews become part of the mainstream. Human experience with xenophobia suggests that it may take a few generations, but with luck the diversity that Dr. Frey discusses will disappear in the future as we see each other just as fellow human beings.

It Isn't Easy Being an "Undocumented Immigrant" in Beijing

Yesterday's NYTimes had a lengthy story about neighborhoods of migrant workers in Beijing being destroyed by the government [see the photo below]. You may recall that China has a household registration system that is designed especially to keep rural villagers in their rural villages, rather than respond to the demand for workers in the city. But, of course, people do move to the cities where the jobs are and they become illegal migrants in the process. 

The city government says they are being pushed out for their own safety, after a recent deadly fire in a migrant settlement. But many migrants say the government is using the fire as an excuse to ramp up efforts to drive them out and ease pressures in a city whose population has already soared beyond 20 million people.

Beijing has set a goal of limiting its population to 23 million residents by 2020, while also making room to attract more higher-paid, university-educated professionals. 

Despite such efforts, officials have so far failed to deter migrants from settling in the city, largely because Beijing still relies on them to be its cooks, couriers and cleaners.

This is exactly the situation that the U.S. faces with undocumented immigrants. The economy is very reliant on them, and an increase in deportations would have very negative effects not just on the migrants themselves, but on local communities whose businesses would be suddenly shorn of needed workers. China, like the U.S., has to come to grips with the idea that you can't need undocumented immigrants and want to destroy their lives at the same time. 

Chinese Cities Combat Low Fertility With High In-Migration

This week's Economist has a very interesting story about the spatial variability in (already low) fertility in China. Sadly, it starts the story with the following quote:

IF DEMOGRAPHY is destiny, as Auguste Comte, a French philosopher, once said, then China has many destinies.

This is sad because it shows that the writers for the Economist don't read my blog, so they don't know the story behind the phrase "demography is destiny," which I laid out more than four years ago.

The story has some sad elements because it reveals that the rural population of China continues to be exploited by the cities. All provinces in China have below-replacement level fertility (see map below), but the rural provinces still have the highest fertility. Fertility is lowest in Beijing, at 0.71 children per woman. Provincial governments handle pensions in China, so those rural provinces that are experiencing migration to the cities are finding that their dependency ratio is rapidly rising (more pensioners per worker), while the cities are replacing the unborn children with rural migrants.

As a whole, China has too few young adults relative to the size of older generations, meaning it will not have enough workers to support its pensioners (or children) properly in the future. But some areas will hit demographic trouble earlier and harder than others, with serious implications for economic growth and regional stability. Wang Feng, of the University of California, Irvine, dubs the problem “the Balkanisation of Chinese demography”.

Unlike in Guangzhou, the national authorities have been slow to recognise the problems of demographic decline. As a result, low fertility, ageing, labour shortages and dependency have all taken on a provincial aspect. The three great cities look relatively healthy, as do Guangdong and Zhejiang, a nearby province that shares some of its features. But provinces with low fertility, declining or ageing populations, and rising dependency are in deep trouble. These include the north-east, Sichuan and Chongqing in the west and several provinces in the third category in terms of fertility, such as Anhui.

The result is a big problem for the national government. Even now, it is having to bail out some provincial pension funds. But the threat is also philosophical. The Communist Party has long sought to narrow economic differences and erase local political distinctions because it is terrified of regional challenges. It thinks the only way to keep China together is to impose strong central control. If it is right, its failure to deal with demographic problems is setting back that cause.

The Chinese government is certainly aware of demographic problems--that is why the one-child policy was implemented in the first place. And it is certainly aware of the common prediction that "China will grow old before it gets rich." At the moment, it may be that government policy under Xi Jinping is to focus in the short term only on getting rich, rather than worrying about how many people are getting old and what that might do to the economy.

Will Hurricane Irma Cause Retirees to Rethink Moving to Florida?

My first teaching job many years ago was at Michigan State University. It seemed to me and my wife that every one of the "locals" in our neighborhood in East Lansing knew people of Florida because Michiganders liked to retire in Florida. Indeed, we heard stories of entire groups of people relocating there together, often living in mobile homes because that's what they could most readily afford.

Currently, nearly one in five Floridians (19.1%) is aged 65 and older--the highest percentage in the country at the state level and, not surprisingly, the top two counties in the U.S. in terms of the percent aged 65 and older are in Florida (Sumter County--NW of Orlando--at 53% and Charlotte County--NW of Fort Meyers--at 38%). Both counties are very much today in the path of Hurricane Irma. If this were just a one-off event, you might not think about it, but the evidence suggests that global warming is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of these kinds of storms.

It is important to remember as well that population growth in hot states like Florida owes a lot to the advent of air conditioning. Beginning especially in the 1950s, commercial establishments were able to afford air conditioning--so you could leave your hot house and go to the air conditioned restaurant or movie theater. By the 1970s, the price of air conditioning had come down to the point that people were able to install it in their homes--first with window units, and then with larger compressor units. So, we shouldn't be surprised that between 1950 and 2015, as the population of the entire U.S. doubled in size from 152 million to 321 million, the population of Florida increased more than seven-fold, from 2.7 million in 1950 to 20.3 million in 2015. It vaulted from the 17th most populous to the 3rd most populous state--behind only California and Texas (both of which have also benefitted from air conditioning). The only states to have grown at a more rapid rate than Florida, in percentage terms, between 1950 and 2015 are also beneficiaries of air conditioning--Nevada and Arizona.

But, back to the older population more specifically, Florida has a high percentage of older people because people move there to retire. The other top states in terms of the older population--Maine, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Montana, are states where youthful populations are exiting the state, in the process leaving behind the older population to age in place. Thus, the decision of people to migrate from wherever they are (e.g., New York) to Florida to retire may increasingly take into account the potential for deadly storms. Arizona is currently 12th among states in terms of the percent aged 65 and older. Will that increase at Florida's expense?

UPDATE: Here's an example of why air conditioning is a key to well-being in Florida, as reported by CNN:

At least eight nursing home residents have died in Hollywood, Florida, according to city officials. The deaths may be due to the loss of the home's air-conditioning after Hurricane Irma struck Sunday, according to CNN affiliate WPLG.

Houston's Demographics Revealed by Hurricane Harvey

Who lives in Houston? A lot of people, to be sure, but until Hurricane Harvey hit, the city's demographics were not a regular topic of conversation, at least not among people with whom I associate. We know Houston as a city that evolved by annexing every piece of land it could and allowing growth to occur without much zoning or regulation. We also know it as a city that has attracted a lot of corporate headquarters. Economic and spatial growth and the creation of jobs have gone together in an almost unique way. An article in today's NYTimes notes that:

This city sprawls over 600 square miles, an area so big that Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit could all fit within it simultaneously. The nine-county Houston metropolitan region, covering more than 10,000 square miles, is almost as large as the entire state of Massachusetts.

Yesterday, an article posted by NBCNews suggests that the population boom in Houston created a bigger disaster there than might otherwise have been the case:

When Hurricane Harvey slammed into Houston last week, it hit a city that is much bigger and more diverse than it was in 2000. Those changes made the storm’s impacts bigger and more complicated.

Growing immigrant populations and sprawling construction have remade the region and will likely make rebuilding efforts, which were never going to be easy, even more difficult.

Since 2000, Houston and surrounding Harris County have undergone a population explosion. Harris County has climbed from 3.4 million people to 4.6 million in 2016 — a 35 percent increase. As a point of comparison, the population of the United States as a whole has grown by about 15 percent since 2000.

Much of Harris County’s population is foreign-born — about 1.1 million people. Roughly 730,000 people are not U.S. citizens, according to Census data. Pew Research estimates that more than a half-million people in the Houston metro area are undocumented immigrants.

Along with that growth has come an increasing ethnic diversity in the population, as evidenced by the following graphic:

I conclude Chapter 9-- "The Urban Transition"--by looking at issues of urban sustainability. Houston is clearly putting urban sustainability to the test.

Justin Stoler on the Linkages Between Violence, Poverty and Policy

Thanks to Tom Boswell for pointing me to an Op-Ed in today's Miami Herald by Justin Stoler and Tanya Zakrison. They build on a research article published earlier this year on gun violence in Miami to lay out the path for creating community change that can, in particular, replace guns with jobs. What a concept! Here are some highlights:

Gun violence has become a silent epidemic among select Miami-Dade communities, leading to hundreds of intentional injuries every year. We call it “silent” because most of the burden is borne by just a handful of communities — ones that have been marginalized for decades.

How did this happen? Surely analysis of other hospital records and police reports would show the same trends, though gun violence research has been stifled for years by the gun lobby’s efforts to limit the collection of gun-related data. But social issues such as race and poverty — long embedded in Miami politics — have deprived many communities of resources needed to strengthen communities from within. This has created a legacy of structural violence — the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs — that has led to an entire generation of impoverished youth for whom violence and the “code of the street” are a way of life, while remaining invisible to those in power.

A truly holistic response to gun violence requires a multipronged approach to ending the school-to-prison pipeline. We need basic food security, hands-on youth mentoring and educational programs, and economic opportunities that offer parents meaningful employment and that allow leisure time to care for their children. Most of all, we also need to work with organizations in affected communities (churches, schools, social service providers) to understand and prioritize their needs. These organizations stand ready and willing to promote proud messages of empowerment with local law enforcement as community partners, not enforcers of an unjust status quo.

We need a society--and communities within that society--where it is easier to get a job than a gun. 

Demographics of Iran's Election

As I write this, voters are at the polls in Iran for the presidential election there. The Economist's description of the supporters of the two candidates sounds not unlike what we saw in this country in terms of the Clinton and Trump contrasts:

Two clerics, both insiders since the first years of the 1979 Islamic revolution, are vying for the 56m votes being cast in today’s presidential race. Their campaigns have been as opposed as their black and white turbans. Appealing to the middle classes, Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent, has promised to open Iran to the West after years of sanctions. He also says he will improve civil liberties, particularly for women and Iran’s many ethnic and religious minorities. His rival, Ebrahim Raisi, is a former judge who has passed hundreds of death sentences, and who is tapping a large rural and working-class base with promises to boost subsidies and defend revolutionary values against a decadent West.

Keep in mind that almost three-fourths of Iran's population lives in urban places (which is where the middle classes tend to congregate), so the urban-rural demographic divide definitely works in Rouhani's favor. But, you would have thought the same with Hillary Clinton, in a country where more than 80 percent of the population lives in urban places. Of course, big city urban can be very different from small town urban, so voter turnout is expected to have an impact on Iran's election, as it did in the U.S. election. 

UPDATE: Rouhani did, indeed, win the election.

The Demographics of Turkey's Referendum Vote

On Sunday the voters in Turkey narrowly (and controversially) decided to hand President Erdogan more power than he already has. The "yes" vote was not distributed randomly, however. A story in the New York Times suggests that a new version of the urban-rural divide was at work:

Whatever the outcome of the appeals, the referendum reflected a country sharply divided, with voters in the major cities tending to oppose the changes while those in rural areas, who usually are more religious and conservative, voting in favor of them.

I use the term "new version" of the urban-rural divide because three-fourths of Turks live in urban areas, so a real divide would have seen the "no" vote win the referendum. What we see in Turkey is not unlike what happened with the Brexit vote, as I noted at the time...

Overall, then, the leavers were older whites with lower levels of education living in areas with few immigrants. As many commentators have noted, this demographic profile sounds a lot like the typical Donald Trump supporter in the US.

...and here is more detail on that support for Trump, as I noted a year ago, which indeed carried him to his win:

“It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”

I like Bill Frey's phraseology of nonurban because of course countries like Turkey, the UK, and the US are not predominantly rural, but outside of the big cities there is still a more traditional attitude towards the world that is based on lower levels of education, higher levels of religiosity (regardless of the religion itself), and less appreciation of what liberal democracy compared to autocracy can mean for a society.

Make More Money; Live Longer

It seems obvious that those with higher incomes can afford more and better health care and thus will have a higher life expectancy. But we tend to think of these relationships in the abstract. When they are exposed in your own area, they take on more poignancy. Thanks to @PopGeog for linking me to a story that I actually had heard a few days ago on the local PBS station (KPBS--here at San Diego State University), put together by the local inewsource.org (which is also located here at SDSU):

The wealthiest men in San Diego County can expect to live almost a decade longer than their poorest counterparts.That’s one of the findings from the Health Inequality Project, a report written by researchers from Stanford, Harvard and MIT. In 2014, the most recent year available, a 40-year-old San Diego County man in the top quarter of income earners could expect to live to almost 90. A man of the same age in the bottom quarter of income would only expect to live to 80.

That is really a pretty astounding difference. You might expect that in a comparison between two countries, but it is certainly less expected in a comparison within a metropolitan area of the world's richest country! 

Despite the gap, the San Diego region ranked as the sixth-best area in the country on life expectancy for the bottom quarter of income earners based on a 14-year average. Robert Fluegge is a pre-doctoral fellow with the Equality of Opportunity Project at Stanford University, which produced the income and life expectancy analysis. He said income can be a good, if not necessarily direct, predictor of health. “It’s not like I wake up one day $10,000 richer and all of a sudden I have no cholesterol anymore,” he said. “Income is sort of a proxy for … your environment, the way you live your life, the access to some services that you may have or information that you may have.”

And the important part of that story is that the differences start at the youngest ages and continue through life. Pick your parents carefully... 

Not Too Many People Want to Raise Children in San Francisco

Thanks to Justin Stoler for pointing me to an urban demography article in today's NYTimes about the declining number of children in San Francisco. The population is fairly young, pushed along as it is by the high-tech industry jobs that now exist in the city, but those young people are not having many kids in the city itself.

A few generations ago, before the technology boom transformed San Francisco and sent housing costs soaring, the city was alive with children and families. Today it has the lowest percentage of children of any of the largest 100 cities in America, according to census data, causing some here to raise an alarm.

“Everybody talks about children being our future,” said Norman Yee, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. “If you have no children around, what’s our future?”

As an urban renaissance has swept through major American cities in recent decades, San Francisco’s population has risen to historical highs and a forest of skyscraping condominiums has replaced tumbledown warehouses and abandoned wharves. At the same time, the share of children in San Francisco fell to 13 percent, low even compared with another expensive city, New York, with 21 percent. In Chicago, 23 percent of the population is under 18 years old, which is also the overall average across the United States.

I have been in and out of San Francisco a lot of over the years, including especially during my undergraduate and graduate school days at Berkeley in the 1960s. No matter what the numbers might say, it was certainly never my impression that the city was "alive with children and families." Both of my sons were born in Berkeley and never in our wildest imaginings would my wife and I have thought of living in San Francisco instead of Berkeley. We have always loved visiting San Francisco (Greens Restaurant in the Marina District is one of our favorite places in the world to eat), but I can readily understand the sentiment that:

“If you get to the age that you’re going to have kids in San Francisco and you haven’t made your million — or more — you probably begin to think you have to leave,” said Richard Florida, an expert in urban demographics and author of “The Rise of the Creative Class.”

Don't worry, though. There are plenty of children in the Bay Area--they live everywhere outside the very confined city limits of the City of San Francisco. To be sure, there are other kinds of children who live in relative abundance in San Francisco--the dog children...

Defining U.S. Regions Using Census Data on Commute to Work

Humans have a natural sense of place and we tend to define ourselves at least partly by where we live. But how do we define the boundaries of places? Political entities are typically used and they may or may not reflect the lives of everyday people. Two researchers have nicely utilized commute to work data from the American Community Survey to organize the U.S. into what might be called "organic" (as opposed to politically defined) regions. The results are published in the open source journal PLOS ONE and summarized on the Atlasobsura.com website. The first map below summarizes the commuting patterns between census tracts in the U.S.:

Now, to be sure, some of those commutes are small in number, but that is all discussed in the paper (which you should read before making a final decision about how you feel about this). Now, combining these linkages with visual interpretation, the researchers (Garrett Dash Nelson, a historical geographer from Dartmouth, and Alasdair Rae, an urban analyst from the University of Sheffield) came up with the following map of "real" regions of the U.S.:

Since the baseline data refer to commuting patterns, these regions represent what we might think of as "spheres of influence" of major cities. Thus, you have one big area in the western states that lacks big cities and thus lacks any real commute patterns. Maybe that's what's left of the "wild west."