It's Lebanot.
To pick an American city to begin my journey into population pyramids, I decided the most logical choice would be to pick the American city where my family (or at least my mother's family) began: Kingsburg. A small town on the Kings River near Fresno, the town was founded and inhabited (mostly) by Swedish immigrants who grew primarily raisins for the Sun-Maid cooperative. As the ages of Kingsburg's residents grew, the town experienced a downturn. Young people left, their parents stayed, and the trend continued on towards the end of the 20th century. Since then, Kingsburg has undergone a minuscule revolution in their population, resulting in a bulge in middle-age and youth populations. This comes from an influx of both former residents and new immigrants from Latin America and East Asia. The population pyramid thus shows a capability of the city to expand in the future, as long as it can retain the youth population it has now. Now we should look at American cities that are expanding rather than those that might expand, starting off with the fastest growing major city: Raleigh, North Carolina. Raleigh, the capital of its state, is firmly in the interior region of the Atlantic Piedmont, an increasingly urban region of the East Coast with a growing technology sector and a youthful population. It is essentially a southern Silicon Valley. And much like Silicon Valley, Raleigh displays an interesting demographic characteristic that it shares with other growing cities, like Austin, Texas. This characteristic is a bell-shape that constricts at the bottom of the chart, a clear deviation from charts of growing populations that tend to continually expand towards the bottom of the chart. This standard form for growing population pyramids can be seen in India, where they have a clear, and very wide bell-shape. This indicates a young adult and adolescent population that can continue to produce a large amount of growth for India. Interestingly, American cities continue to grow while lacking this same adolescent population. This indicates the unique aspect of American city growth that it stems from a high immigration/emigration ratio rather than a high birth/death ratio. The fastest expanding cities are those that attract young migrants either through jobs in technology or through simple popularity rather than those with the highest fertility rates. For additional proof of this, one can simply look to American cities currently experiencing negative growth. For some background, a standard population pyramid for a population experiencing negative growth can be seen in Japan, shown below. This type of pyramid should have a relatively high population of older people, like in Japan where the two largest age groups are those 70 to 74 years old and 45 to 49 years old. To contrast, a contracting American city, of which the worst is Cleveland, shown below, is completely reversed. While the population is generally older than the populations of growing cities, matching the standard, the American cities have strong youth populations and a relatively common dispersal across age groups (though Cleveland has a few dips). According to standard rulles, this should indicate a stable population. Instead, these cities experience falling populations and dying neighborhoods. This divergence can again be attributed to the importance of migration in the United States. These cities experience negative growth because of the collapse of industry and thus employment. Meanwhile, countries like Japan experience negative growth because of aging populations. The lesson that can be learned from these differences is a different dynamic for national populations when compared to city populations. While national populations tend to stay in the same country for everything from economic to cultural to legal reasons, city populations tend to be more extra-mobile. The barriers to moving out of a city are far lower than the barriers to moving out of a country, thus cities are far more susceptible to migration in and out of the city. On the converse, because barriers to leaving a country are higher for every number of reasons, countries are far more susceptible to birth and death rates. On the whole, this difference helps to show two things: First, there is a clear divide between a city and a country in not just definition, but in dynamic; and second, don’t worry, it’s just Cleveland. |
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