Kingsley Davis's The Urbanization Of The Human Population

Kingsley Davis, who is said to have pioneered the study of historical urban demography wrote his “The Urbanization of the Human population” in 1965. In his essay, he states that the history of the world is in fact the history of urbanization and then begins with description of how tiny European settlements grew slowly through the Middle Ages and the early modern period. According to him, urbanization occurred mainly because of rural-urban migration and not the other factors that people believe. He discusses how the production levels of this time period, due to the feudal system, used to favor an agrarian culture and then how the process of urbanization intensified during the 1900s, especially in Great Britain. He then clarifies the difference between urbanization, which he describes as the process of a society becoming more urban-focused, and the growth of cities i.e. the expansion of their boundaries. Davis describes the urbanization process as occurring along an S curve, beginning slow, becoming fast, and then slowing down again. Based on this idea of S curve, he predicts an end to urbanization.
The next essay “The Urban Revolution” was by arguably the single most influential archaeologist of twentieth century, V. Gordon Childe. In this writing, he redefines the major eras of human development. Instead of using the traditional three ages of Stone, Bronze and Iron, Childe argues that development is better seen as occurring in the Paleolithic, Neolithic, urban, and