Guest Editorial: “Spatializing Demography for the Urban Future”

Abstract

Today’s demographic methods inherit traditions from an era when far less than half of the world’s population lived in cities and towns. Now that the world’s population as a whole has become more urban than rural, it is an opportune moment to ask whether these methods and the concepts that have informed them would benefit from a reappraisal. To ensure that demographic thinking continues to add value in the upcoming urban era, we should ask: What features of urban context and demographic behavior are distinctive from rural? In what way do the multiple spaces of urban life—its neighborhoods, the social networks that traverse neighborhoods, the connections and flows that reach across cities and link to rural areas, the multiple levels and units of government, and the highly diverse private sector of the urban economy—need to be considered in fashioning new methodological and conceptual tools? In the high-income West, one can draw insight from a venerable tradition of detailed sociological, geographic, and economic analysis of cities. But it remains surprising how limited to high-income settings this ‘‘Chicago School’’ of analysis has been, and how seldom its theoretical apparatus has been trained on the cities and towns of poor countries. Furthermore, to rely on methods that for the most part treat the wide variety of cities and towns as if they are all