5.9 Areas of settlement
The industrial revolution forced people to move from villages where all relations were concrete to towns with generalized social structures and values.
In the post-industrial era the biggest demographic boom affects the big cities and city agglomerations. At the beginning of the third millennium more than half the world’s population lived in cities and towns for the first time in human history. The forecast is that the urban percentage of the world population will keep rising. This trend is followed by the tendency towards bigger individual autonomy when more and more urban people live alone and use public and private Self-Service infrastructures to satisfy their needs.