KS3 Geography › Cities
KS3 Geography › Cities
These are the points the worksheet questions are built around.
More than half of everyone alive today lives in a city — but that had never been true in the whole of human history until around 2008. For thousands of years, most people lived spread out across the countryside, and then, remarkably quickly, that flipped.
Geographers rank settlements by two things: how many people live there, and how much that place offers. This ranking is called the settlement hierarchy. At the bottom sits the hamlet — just a handful of homes, often with no shops and maybe not even a school. Above that is the village, with a few hundred people, perhaps one small shop and a primary school. Then comes the town, bigger again, with more shops, several schools, and a wider range of services. Above that is the city, with a large population, hospitals, colleges, train and bus networks, and a wide variety of jobs. Right at the top sits the global city — places like London, New York, and Tokyo, which don't just serve their own region but shape business and culture across the entire planet. Moving up this hierarchy isn't just about population — it's about the range of things on offer growing too.
Urbanisation is the increase in the proportion of people living in towns and cities — not just that cities have more people, but that a bigger share of everyone on Earth is choosing to live in one. Looking at the data since 1980, the share of the world living in urban areas has climbed steadily while the rural share has fallen, and the two lines crossed around 2008 — the first time in history more than half the world's population lived in towns and cities. This trend isn't limited to wealthy countries; it's happening globally.
Two main things drive this growth. The first is rural-to-urban migration — people moving from the countryside into towns and cities, pulled in by better transport and job opportunities. London is a clear example: motorways, railways, airports, and the Underground make it easy to reach and move around, while jobs in banking, technology, health services, and tourism draw people in from the surrounding area and beyond.
The second cause is natural increase — simply when births outnumber deaths, so a population grows from within. Many people who migrate into cities are young adults who then go on to have children of their own, meaning cities grow both from people moving in and from population growth happening internally.
When it comes to where the world's biggest cities actually are, the pattern has shifted. Wealthy countries like the UK, USA, and Japan did most of their urban growing long ago, during the industrial revolution, and their cities are now large but fairly settled. Today, the fastest urban growth is happening in low- and middle-income countries, with rapidly rising populations and huge numbers of people moving from the countryside into cities.
This shift is clearest among megacities — cities with ten million people or more. In 1950, the entire planet had just two: Tokyo and New York. By 1975, there were four, with Osaka and Mexico City joining. By 2020, there were around 39 megacities, and most of them are now in Asia. Where the biggest cities once sat mainly in high-income countries, today many of the largest — like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Lagos — are in countries like China, India, and Nigeria.
In short: settlements are ranked in a hierarchy from tiny hamlets up to global cities, based on population and services offered. Urbanisation — the rising proportion of people living in urban areas — is driven by rural-to-urban migration and natural increase, and by 2008 it had, for the first time, pushed more than half the world's population into towns and cities. While the biggest cities once belonged to high-income countries, today's fastest growth and largest megacities are increasingly found in low- and middle-income countries instead.
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The 3 questions from the video, one at a time. See if you caught them.
1. Which settlement sits at the very top of the hierarchy?
Why: Settlements go from small to large: hamlet, village, town, city and global city. A global city is at the top because it has the most people and influences the whole world.
2. Which of these is NOT a cause of urban growth?
Why: Cities grow when people move into them and when more babies are born than people die. People leaving for the countryside would make cities smaller.
3. Which countries are urbanising fastest today?
Why: Cities are growing fastest in low- and middle-income countries, where lots of people move from farms to cities to find work. Most rich countries are already heavily urbanised.
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