Topic: The advantages of urbanisation outweigh the disadvantages

Teacher’s Name: Helen Howarth

Date: 11 April, 2011

Word Count: 682

Urbanisation is the direction of most country’s development. Urbanisation defined by the United Nations as movement of people from rural to urban areas with population growth equating to urban migration. In the contemporary world, urbanisation is advancing at an amazing speed in present-day society. For example, China’s urbanization rate is 46.59% in 2009, which means almost half of the rural area became urban area this year. Urbanisation is playing a significant role in our lives. But in the meantime, whether urbanisation has sparked much debate. Some people assert that the advantages of urbanisation outweigh the disadvantages, while many others argue that urbanisation disadvantages than advantages. Personally, I am in favor of the former view. In my opinion, urbanisation is the natural process of human evolution, because humans want to live in a better environment with greater facilities and opportunities and enjoy a better condition of social material life, and the most important reason is urbanization promote the economic growth (Wikipedia–urbanization).
The first and most important reason supporting my view is that urbanisation benefits our life. Urbanisation makes the benefits of facilities and opportunities available to us. This means that people can get knowledge from libraries and museums, and improve the knowledge of people to find a better job. Another opportunity is women’s education effect. For instance, in China, before the urbanisation, people cannot get enough knowledge to bring them to higher education which lead to a slower development. The effect of education for women is an example of the benefit from these opportunities. According to the Demographic and Health Surveys (2003~2006), women’s education leads to different family size. For example, in 2003, in the Philippines the total fertility rate for women with no education was 5.3, for women with primary school education it was 5.0, but for women with secondary or higher education it was 3.1 ( Human Population: Women, 2006).
The second reason is that the development of urbanisation contributes to economic growth. According to economists, at present, China’s urbanisation rate is less than 46%, while that of developed countries mostly stands above 90 %. It means one percentage point of increase in China’s urbanisation rate will promote over 10 million rural residents to move to urban area. Meanwhile, despite the fall in rural population, the agricultural output will continue to grow thanks to increased agricultural productivity, which can help to sustain China’s relatively high economic growth rate. Because they will require housing, education and employment, this will in turn bring about massive construction projects, such as apartment, school and factory. For this reason, urbanisation can make the economic growth. (Consumption and urbanization to drive China’s economy, 2009)
Some people argue that the disadvantages of urbanisation outweigh the advantages, because the development of urbanisation has also brought pollution and poverty. It is true that urbanisation has bad aspects. For example, Bangkok in Thailand, there are many motorcycles, cars and buses on the city’s street. All of these cars and motorcycles are a major cause of air pollution and heavy traffic in this city. Poverty is a huge problem in Cairo, Egypt where the population doubled between 1980 and 2000 to about 18 million residents and 50% of new residents live in slums. However, there are issues that can be solved. Investment is one way of solving the poverty and environment, because people don’t have enough money to improve their. “However, in some places, trends are changing.” report says. Architects, engineer, and politicians are starting to designing new cities that are environmentally smart. Design principles for “smart growth”, including smaller communities with parks and gardens, and efficient public transportation. In China, the government has a sustainable development policy, which means before the development of business, the government will estimate its actual function and influence. (McEntire, J. &Williams, J, 2009)
In conclusion, while urbanisation has some problems, it’s still clear that urbanisation will continue development. I would recommend the use of technology to bring the urbanisation development along. If we do this, our world will become a modern metropolis where have a lot of parks and convenient transport facilities.