Climate change impacts, including farm failure, degraded living conditions, political motives, conservation displacement, and infrastructure displacement, compel migration, largely to cities, but also to rural areas with high migrant–host conflict risk. Policymakers, facing high uncertainty, decide whether to launch state resettlement programs to control migration destinations. Indonesia’s transmigrasi, Malaysia’s FELDA, and Thailand’s Nikhom demonstrate the complexity of major resettlement programs. Yet, policymakers may evade accountability by ignoring migrations.Policymakers may try to reduce migration through local relocation or changing local conditions such as land contouring to reduce flood risk. Urban overcrowding prompts new city development, increasingly under private-sector control, and urban rehabilitation.

With rising incomes, population growth speeds up and then slows as incomes climb. This demographic change is driven by economic growth, not the reverse. That was the case in northwestern Europe in particular, and its precocious economic growth did not result from any other demographic advantages such as an unusual family structure. Northwestern Europe did benefit, though, from highly productive agriculture that allowed northwestern Europe’s peasant farmers to feed a larger urban population than in China. They could do this from roughly 1500 on because unlike peasants in eastern Europe they were free of serfdom and their property rights that were secure. They also enjoyed a favorable natural environment. With the food they produced, northwestern Europe early on developed clusters of cities that were unknown elsewhere in Eurasia and that proved crucial for economic growth. These urban clusters helped circulate new technologies and ideas. Such urban agglomeration effects were critical to the Industrial Revolution.

Whether one is looking at the planet Earth or at the United States or at Texas, it is clear that the population is far from being equally distributed. Most of the people in China and the United States live in the eastern sections, but the distribution in China is far more concentrated in the eastern half of the country, where 90 percent of the population resides. In the United States, considerably more than 10 percent of the population resides in the western half of the country, unlike the situation in China. In some countries, people are more likely to be rural than urban dwellers. Generally, however, there is an urbanization movement throughout the world. This chapter is especially concerned with examining how the inhabitants of the world are distributed, and how most of them have become city dwellers rather than cave dwellers, as was the case thousands of years ago.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.

Focusing on William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) and related essays and tourist writing of the 1810s, this chapter explains how he adapted traditional views of Anglican churchyards as sacred commons where local community was composted and cultivated over time, even as dislocation and erasure of rural communities, urbanization, and religious diversification undermined ties between churchyards and local belonging. The chapter interrogates how Wordsworth re-membered the geography, residents, and species of the Lake District within and around an idealized Anglican churchyard that was based on the one near to him in Grasmere yet loosened from denominational boundaries. He did so to reclaim local interspecies and semi-egalitarian lifeways among small landowners and their environments perceived to be threatened by extractive, colonizing capitalism. He nonetheless nostalgically distorted and risked denying agency to those re-membered, and uneasily suggested that agents and beneficiaries of capitalist empire might become conservators of traces of formal local lifeways.

Dodona lies in the northwest of Greece, south of Ioannina. It is situated in the midst of a lovely, peaceful green valley, overlooked by the twin peaks of Tomaros. Natural openings disrupt the rugged geomorphological relief and allow bilateral movements to and from Epirus’ hinterland areas and the coast. It is acclaimed by the ancient writers as the oldest oracle in ancient Greece, with researchers placing its origins as far back as the Bronze Age. The whole area is scattered with ruins, including an imposing theatre, the sanctuary and an acropolis enclosed by fortified walls, occupying an area of 164.659,43 m2.The aim of this paper is to contextualize the architectural development of the sanctuary of Dodona from prehistory till the first century BCE within a general overview of the sacred landscape. It aims to provide a synthesis of the architectural development of the temenos based on previous and recent excavation data. It argues that the transformation of the sanctuary of Dodona from a small open-air shrine to a pan-Epirote and pan-Hellenic cult centre seems to be associated with the urbanization of Epirus and the formation of an Epirotic identity.

This chapter provides an overview of the process of urbanization after 1947 and its impacts, highlighting its contested meanings, measurement and policy outcomes. Noting the contrasting ways in which urbanization is occurring, the chapter first reviews the debates over India’s slow urbanization and its possible causes. It then turns to the way the government has influenced the process through the dirigisme policies of the first forty years since independence, followed by economic liberalization in the last three decades. Some of these policies are best observed in the changing profile of the largest cities of the country, such as the three colonial port cities of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai and, to a lesser extent, in small towns and emerging urban places. Improvements in urban services and quality of life have occurred, but unevenly, with small towns and poorer households in larger cities lagging behind.

During the Early Republic, Virginia’s cities grew rapidly, creating a cosmopolitan society without precedent in the Old Dominion. Both the salon and amateur musicianship were hallmarks of a new elite urban society, as demonstrated in the life of Adeline Myers (1791–1832), the eldest daughter of the first Jewish couple to settle in Norfolk. The Myerses’ home had two capacious salons, household spaces that had come en vogue in elite Virginian townhomes at the turn of the nineteenth century. In these salons, young women like Adeline did more than display their musical accomplishments; they asserted their place as cultural leaders and innovators, especially during the social seasons that brought together the state’s belles and beaux. Beyond Norfolk, Adeline engaged with salon culture in Richmond and Philadelphia, where she regularly enjoyed the company of other Jewish women who shared her devotion to literature, music, and learning.

This volume closes with Brenna Bhandar’s fascinating inquiry into how rights bear on housing. Adequate housing is one of the older goals of mobilizational struggle, consecrated in such instruments as the UDHR and the post-Apartheid South African Constitution. At the same time, Bhandar documents, its salience has arisen in the age of financialization and neoliberalism, with their consequences for the precariously homed or unhomed. Human rights struggles do not always identify and therefore do not challenge the very culprits for the violence of the norms they invoke; but even here, Bhandar closes by invoking a “right to the city” that would overcome this long-standing limitation of human rights history, which is to multiply in their agents and domains, but not always in ways that undermine power or wealth locally or globally.

This chapter explores the interplay between China’s economic transformation and its shifting demographic landscape over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It examines how an initially favorable age structure and abundant labor drove a period of material abundance and rapid growth, yielding a significant lifecycle surplus. Using a lifecycle approach with National Transfer Accounts, the authors analyze changes in labor income and consumption profiles, revealing that while early decades witnessed rising surplus driven by robust income growth and low dependency, the 2010s saw consumption outpacing income amid accelerating population aging. This resulted in a sharp contraction of the aggregate lifecycle surplus and a declining effective support ratio. The analysis further decomposes the impacts of changes in per capita income–consumption patterns versus demographic shifts, projecting that continuing aging will likely exhaust the surplus in the coming decades, posing critical challenges for China’s future economic and social policies.