During the nineteenth century, a new type of urban centre arose, one based on production, industrial technology, and massed population. This new urban structure arose from the cities of early modern Europe of the sixteenth through eighteenth century. These cities had been the focus of increasing urbanisation as well, but rather than producing a massive labour force, they had seen the development and growth of a new urban elite. Wealthy merchants, traders, and aspiring nobility had dominated these earlier cities. The urban growth of the nineteenth century was characterised by even more massive concentrations of populations, with industrial labour taking the foreground. This emerging tendency towards concentrated areas of population was encouraged by the Industrial Revolution and improvements in transport, namely railways. Heavy industrialisation and increasing dependence on railway travel were both found primarily in England and the United States, and these motivating factors transformed the distribution of population in these areas. Urbanisation was accompanied by a decrease in the importance of agriculture and an increase in manufacturing and public utilities. The concentrated populations of cities made them ideal manufacturing and production centres, as larger production units were more efficient mechanisms for the industrial world. This meant more jobs on assembly lines and in factories, which led to increased specialisation and division of labour. Urban centres encouraged their own expansion; their large populations attracted manufacturing and production, which in turn attracted more workers, furthering the growth of industry, and so on. Overall, areas experiencing the growth of cities saw a regional migration from rural to urban areas. Agricultural land near cities was vacated in favour of manufacturing or commercial regions, with the resulting gaps in rural life being filled by new migrants from further afield. Most of the people moving to the cities were young adults, with a slightly larger percentage of women than men being attracted to urban life. Women were probably migrating more for marriage opportunity than for economic opportunity, as there were more potential mates in a city than in a small rural village.

In present-day Canada and the United States, the time between 1865 and 1917 was one of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. By this time, groups descended from the earliest migrants (the English, Scottish, Germans, and Scandinavians) were largely working as skilled labourers. With the increasing importance of mass production, the need for large amounts of unskilled labour meant that many new immigrants were able to find jobs only as assembly line workers. Female immigrants worked in both skilled and unskilled fields, often in textiles or as domestic help. Because jobs were available mainly in industrial areas, migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe tended to settle mainly in areas of urbanisation and industrialisation. At the same time, many people looking for work migrated from rural to urban areas. The overall effect was one of rapidly expanding cities and industrial growth.

Urbanisation also resulted in declining mortality and fertility, meaning that people lived longer but had fewer children in the urban environment. Major centres of population also furthered the growth of labour specialisation, and placed the economic emphasis on liquid capital rather than on more rural, regional forms of trade and exchange. There was increasing economic and geographical interdependence. Cities expanded beyond the sustainable limits imposed by their immediate surroundings, which meant that more goods, services, and labour had to imported from other areas. The urban environment also encouraged the development of systems of government able to deal inclusively with large populations. Organised, elected governments, which used mass media as a primary communication tool, were largely the products of emerging industrial cities.