The process of European urbanization was neither new in the sixteenth century nor did it progress at the same rate and in the same way in every part of Europe. Much depended on economic and demographic change, and on the size, character, and location of individual urban centers. Some general trends can be identified. By contrast with conditions in 1500, when a relatively small proportion of the European population lived in urban centers and carried out activities that were identifiably urban (with the exception of northern and central Italy and the Netherlands), the map of Europe at the end of the twentieth century was dominated by networks of urban centers, whose collective populations represented a high proportion of the continent's total inhabitants. Most of this change had taken place since the middle of the nineteenth century and was linked in some way with the economic growth associated with industrialization.