Safer in Cities?

In an article in The Atlantic, “You're More Likely to Die a Violent Death in Rural America Than in a City,” author Emily Badger explains why the title may be true based on the recently published study, “Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the United States?” published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

The study looked at every injury death in America between 1999 and 2006, excluding death by terrorism from the National Center for Health Statistics. That number totaled 1,295,919 deaths which were tagged with the county where the injury took place, with counties classified on a 10-step continuum from urban to rural. The main findings of the study says is urban areas are significantly safer than rural areas, when looking at all means of death due to injury with the top three causes of death being motor vehicle crashes, firearm use or accident, and poisoning.

Maps from "Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the United States?" by S. Myers et al. in Annals of Emergency Medicine

For First Time, China's Urban Residents Outnumber Rural

The Economist's daily chart focuses on the movement of China's people into urban areas. At the end of 2011, and according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, 1.35 billion, or 51.3 percent of China's residents lived in cities, meaning that for the first time the country's "city-dwellers now outnumber its rural residents." According to The Economist, as recently as "1980 less than a fifth of China’s population lived in cities, a smaller proportion than in India."

In the ten years that followed, the Chinese government "remained wary of free movement, even as it made its peace with free enterprise." It "sought industrialisation without urbanisation," only to ultimately realize that "it could not have one without the other." And although the percentage of city-dwellers is on the rise, it seems that the Chinese government's wariness toward urban development has slowed the movement of its citizens to cities. The Economist notes, "Even now, its ratio of city-dwellers is, if anything, low for an economy at its stage of development."