Global Urbanization Essay

Global urbanization is known to be an ongoing process nowadays, which originates in Western world, but continues to spread in developing world as well and is especially significant in Asia at the moment. In particular, global urbanization is a population shift from rural to urban areas, the gradual increase in the proportion of people living in urban areas . Living in a city provides the residents various opportunities: gives easier access to health care and schools, as well as offers many more job possibilities and better services in general. However, due to widespread rural-urban migration, one out of four people living in a city becomes a dweller of slums instead of living the fulfilling urban life they had anticipated . The slums are settlements, neighborhoods, or city regions that cannot provide the basic living conditions necessary for their inhabitants to live in a safe and healthy environment . In fact, residents of slums live in contaminated, impoverished, dangerous and brutal areas that are arduous to move away from to start a new life in better conditions. Hence, sociologists and anthropologists have argued that slum residents deviate from the morals, norms, and standards of public decency held up by the wider conventional community (Gans 1962; Anderson 1999). In comparison to wealthy city

Being aware of the fact that their personal needs are incomparable with the ones of wealthier people facilitates to understand individual behavior. Moreover, it is very unlikely for the residents of the slums to have certain aspects fulfilled from the fundamental human needs. Slum residents oftentimes are satisfied with their life, since the closely related community they live in helps them overcome the lack of other important needs. Overall, there exist biased opinions about life in slums; it is often perceived more disastrous than it actually