the.com/urbanization

means The process by which populations shift from rural areas into cities, and by which those cities grow and spread to absorb them.

from Built from Latin 'urbs' (city) — the same root that gives us 'urban' and 'suburb' — plus the '-ization' suffix that turns a noun into a process word, the kind that also gave us 'modernization' and 'globalization.' The word itself is a 19th-century coinage, rising alongside the real-world phenomenon it names: as the Industrial Revolution pulled people off farms and into factory towns, language scrambled to keep up with the migration.