Zelinsky Model - Model Stages

Model Stages

Phase one (“Premodern traditional society”): This is before the onset of the urbanisation, and there is very little migration. Natural increase rates are about zero.

Phase two (“Early transitional society”): There is “massive movement from countryside to cities... as a community experiences the process of modernisation”. There is “rapid rate of natural increase”.

Phase three (“Late transitional society”): This phase corresponds to the “critical rung...of the mobility transition” where urban-to-urban migration surpasses the ruralto- urban migration, where rural-to-urban migration “continues but at waning absolute or relative rates”, and a “complex migrational and circulatory movements within the urban network, from city to city or within a single metropolitan region” increased, non-economic migration and circulation began to emerge.

Phase four (“Advanced society”): The “movement from countryside to city continues but is further reduced in absolute and relative terms, vigorous movement of migrants from city to city and within individual urban agglomerations...especially within a highly elaborated lattice of major and minor metropolises” is observed. There is “slight to moderate rate of natural increase or none at all”.

Phase five (“Future superadvanced society”): “Nearly all residential migration may be of the interurban and intraurban variety….No plausible predictions of fertility behaviour,...a stable mortality pattern slightly below present levels”.