Practice question · True or false
Pre-modern cities had death rates above their birth rates and grew only through migration.
Hints
- Could a pre-modern city sustain itself?
- The urban graveyard effect.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Crowding, contaminated water and epidemic disease meant cities consumed population; London needed a continuous inflow from the countryside merely to hold steady. Urban growth was therefore a rural story, and the pattern only broke with nineteenth-century sanitation.
Practise Urban Geography and City Systems
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