The distinction between urban and rural was clear under the Ancien Régime , as societies featured a low level of mobility. The industrial revolution increased the identification between cities, manufacturing and modernity. After the Second World War, growing road traffic freed industries from urban locations and suburbanisation thus increased. Simultaneously, the increase in food productivity required fewer and fewer agricultural workers. After more than two centuries of rural exodus, rurbanisation transformed rural areas, even as this very process of rurbanisation should be seen as part of a global megapolization process. This pattern implies new kinds of relations between the rural and the urban, including from a political point of view.