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Urbanization effects
The concept of the word sustainability
Urbanization effects
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Movements Towards Sustainability
“The Death of Sprawl,” an article written by Warren Karlenzig, makes strong points on how urban and suburban development led to a non-sustainable future for the environment. The author is strongly against suburban boom and he implies every aspect of the growth is a disadvantage. His study proves heavy researches were done, however, it lacks of suggestions on how a reader can make changes effectively. On the other hand, “Local Government in a Time of Peak Oil and Climate Change,” written by John Kaufmann, provides responses and solutions to a number of problems the population is facing. This article is intended for audiences from local government as well as to people who are willing to involve and make changes.
According to Karlenzig, suburban development makes people buy more cars, consume more gas and waste more times on commuting. This is very inefficient in terms of economy and sustainability. He even hints most of the people in the US rarely walk or bike and rely heavily on car for the mode of transportation. It will continue
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He focuses on how local government can act in order to transform into a green city like Portland. As Portland has been established as one of the most sustainable city in the US, the author’s advice will provide high impact on changes on other cities as well. In order to achieve a change, one has to commit himself fully into green movements. It is agreeable that people make government and they in turn, decide what the future of economy is. Currently, transportation in the US is the biggest drawback in becoming sustainable. If buses were more frequent and had accessibility to almost anywhere, there will certainly be more people using public transportation and less cars on the road. It is the same for other changes; Portland has taken great steps in utilizing renewable energy, recycling more than 50% of the wastes and improving water
Finally in 1991, the federal government initiated a ‘Better Cities Program’ which aimed to make Australian cities sustainable and more liveable. It encoura...
In modern suburbs things like cul-de-sacs and tangle towns are more common to be designed with. This makes it virtually impossible to include a mass transit system into the suburb. Thus, more driving, more gas use, and more emissions created in the atmosphere. A common response to this from a suburban residential is that the city is jam packed with congestion and pollution from stop and go traffic. Yet with cities, they are more dense, highly populated and many of the stop and go traffic is created by workers who live in the suburbs coming into the city at rush hour. One thing that works well in a typical city is mass transit. Things like buses, subways and train systems work well with block by square block areas, but not so with winding curving neighborhoods such as in suburbs. Another reason why mass transit does not play a major roll in the life of one who lives in a suburb is that suburban commuting consists of many different directions and destinations. Where as in the city typical people are commuting into the downtown. A central destination such as a downtown keeps things more conveniently close, and since so many people are making the trip to one single common place then gas can be saved by major carpooling, or in other words mass transit.
Many Americans would be shocked to learn that the American Dream may be the cause
Of the many problems affecting urban communities, both locally and abroad, there is one issue in particular, that has been victimizing the impoverished within urban communities for nearly a century; that would be the problem of gentrification. Gentrification is a word used to describe the process by which urban communities are coerced into adopting improvements respective to housing, businesses, and general presentation. Usually hidden behind less abrasive, or less stigmatized terms such as; “urban renewal” or “community revitalization” what the process of gentrification attempts to do, is remove all undesirable elements from a particular community or neighborhood, in favor of commercial and residential enhancements designed to improve both the function and aesthetic appeal of that particular community. The purpose of this paper is to make the reader aware about the significance of process of gentrification and its underlying impact over the community and the community participation.
Again, this section will give a working definition of the “urban question’. To fully compare the political economy and ecological perspectives a description of the “urban question” allows the reader to better understand the divergent schools of thought. For Social Science scholars, from a variety of disciplines, the “urban question” asks how space and the urban or city are related (The City Reader, 2009). The perspective that guides the ecological and the social spatial-dialect schools of thought asks the “urban question” in separate distinct terminology. Respected scholars from the ecological mode of thinking, like Burgess, Wirth and others view society and space from the rationale that geographical scope determines society (The City Reader, 2009). The “urban question” that results from the ecological paradigm sees the relationship between the city (space) as influencing the behaviors of individuals or society in the city. On the other hand...
Cities all over the world are developing. As war ended in 1942, a significant number of people move to the city because they want to improve life. This urbanization process is causing a number of problems and should be met by sustainable development policies. In the beginning, it is important to know the definition of sustainable development. There are some definitions for sustainable development, but simply they say that sustainable development is a development which using resources now and preserving them for future generations (Adams, 1999, p.137). This concept has been agreed internationally at a Rio Conference in 1992 to be implemented by all government policies which mostly known as “Agenda 21” principles (Adams, 1999, p.141). This paper will show that traffic jams and housing problems caused by urbanization can be met by sustainable development policies. The structure of this paper will first explain the situation that leads to traffic jams and housing problems. Next, it will elaborate the sustainable development solutions, implications for the solutions, and evaluations how effective the sustainable development solutions solved the problems.
Therefore these multiple perspectives make the topic of urban sustainability a wicked problem because there is “no definitive formulation” (Rittel and Webber 1973, p.161). There are also many solutions to this wicked problem of urban sustainability that “are not true or false, but good or bad” (Rittel & Webber 1973,
The causes of Suburbanization started with the GI Bill, this gave veterans coming back from the war loans for homes. Many soldiers were coming back from the Cold War and they were in need of homes and jobs, and the Baby Boom created a need for a home to start a family, therefore there was more demand for houses. Levittown's were being built to meet the demands for housing, this created large neighborhoods with the same style houses and it gave ordinary people the opportunity to buy an affordable house. The consequences of suburbanization are that more people were moving to the suburbs, so the inner cities were now having a low tax rate which made those cities poor. The National Highway was built and it expanded the options to drive to work instead of taking the transit, which lowered profits for those businesses. Many families were moving constantly between different houses and they were now able to do this because of the mobility access that was available, but it hurt house owners.
Sprawling may seem like a great idea for those whom grew tire of a congested city life, and want to live in a more spacious and “safe” environment. There may be many benefits for those who seek more personal space, but there are just as many negative impacts. First and foremost I would like to address that it would be very difficult to defend sprawl as there is a predominant view that it is responsible for everything that is wrong with America. Sprawl has many negative consequences that affect our quality of life, and our natural habitat. We have to put in consideration the need of the many, and not the desire of the few.
With today’s ubiquitous discussion about environmental issues, people are in the significant and enormous movement that has ever happened. Facing more and more serious environment issues, such as global warming, scarcity of resources, ecological imbalance, people pay more and more attention on the terms like “climate change”, “sustainability” and “green”. In this atmosphere, a great debate has arisen among land use and development. One claims that nowadays more and more rural lands are over consumed and the urban size expands enormously with continuous suburbanization; this uncontrolled and scattered growth may result in “loss of prime farmlands, deforestation, reduced diversity of native species, increased runoff of storm water, excessive
In this regard, city authorities all over the world are increasingly adopting energy efficiency measures in a quest to become sustainable into the future. Consequently, this has led to the emergence of the term ‘green cities’ (Aulisi & Hanson, 2004). New York City, viewed by many as an urban, concrete jungle, was recently named the “greenest city" in the United States. This is mainly because most of its residents live in energy-efficient buildings, and use public transport, bicycl...
Indeed, many global cities face compelling urban planning issues like urban sprawl, population, low density development, overuse of non-renewable natural recourses, social inequities and environmental degradation. These issues affect the cities themselves, the adjacent regions and often even globally. The resulting ecological footprint upsets the balance in adjacent rural and natural areas. Unplanned or organic development leads to urban sprawl, traffic problems, pollution and slums (as evident in the case of Mumbai city). Such unplanned development causes solid waste management and water supply to fall inadequate. Urban sprawl gives rise to low density development and car dependent communities, consequently leading to increased urban flooding, low energy efficiency, longer travel time and destruction of croplands, forests and open spaces for development.
As previously implied, cities are currently the antithesis of even the barest sense of sustainability. To succinctly define the term “sustainability” would be to say that it represents living within one’s needs. When it comes to the city, with almost zero local sources of food or goods, one’s means is pushed and twisted to include resources originating far beyond the boundaries of the urban landscape. Those within cities paradoxically have both minimal and vast options when it comes to continuing their existence, yet this blurred reality is entirely reliant on the resources that a city can pull in with its constantly active economy.
Moore said that we can understand sustainability as “a storyline, a narrative thread that people use to understand how the past, present, and future can be connected in different ways” (Moore 2007). Since the understanding of sustainability has been changing, we can neither predict what will happen in the future nor establish a set of rules for the future generation to follow. As Norton argued, sustainable activities can be conducted in the present “without negatively impacting the range of important choices that should be left open to the next generation” (Norton 2005:432). Therefore, it’s crucial to apprehend the nature of sustainable cities in order to set up the framework while never kill
With the development of urbanization, an increasing number of social problems have emerged. These problems will decelerate the urban development, however, there are many ways in which sustainable development can reduce the impact of these urbanization problems. “Sustainable development seeks to improve the quality of human life without undermining the quality of our natural environment” (Adams, W.M. 1999). Actually, sustainable development can partly solve the urbanization problems, for it can reduce the impact of the problems such as traffic jam, housing shortage and severe pollution, but it is difficult to completely solve these problems in a short time.