Population Geography and Settlement Studies

Abstract

Oil wealth has transformed Libya, a desertic and sparsely populated country, bringing dramatic demographic changes (Zoghlami 1979). El Mehdawi and Clarke (1982) and Lawless and Kezeiri (1983) describe and analyse the growing polarisation of the population in the north-west and north-east coastal regions which contain the two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi. They show that in recent years spatial duality has been sharply intensified by strong rural to urban migration and also by an increase in interregional migration. The concentration of new development programmes in certain urban centres has been the main cause of the development differential among the regions. As a result the regions which include the most important urban centres have become the most prosperous and the others have become less developed or even depressed. This has been the main cause of the rapid increase in both rural to urban migration and interregional migration. The inhabitants of the less developed regions have continued to move in increasing numbers to those which are more developed. The large majority of migrants who moved from these less developed regions are represented by rural people who have changed their place of residence and their occupation. They have left their work in the rural sector to seek employment in the industrial and service sector. As a result agricultural production has declined. The agrarian sector now employs less than a quarter of the Libyan workforce and the percentage of nomads and semi-nomads has declined to under 10% of the population. Albergani and Vignet-Zunz (1982) have shown that colonial invasion and occupation followed by the Second World War threatened the Bedouin of the Jebel Akhdar with extinction, not through sedentarisation but through the mass migration of a devastated rural population. The advent of oil and the high salary levels available in urban centres further encouraged this tendency. Gannous (1979) studied the movement of Bedouin from rural areas to the town of Al Abiyar and the erosion of Bedouin culture by urban values.