Most people opt to leave countryside to achieve greater opportunities offered in the cities. Such a move carries with it plenty of disadvantages to the environment and people as well. The benefits and drawbacks relating to urbanization range in a wide and comprehensive scope. Nowadays, the urbanization issue is in frequent discussions more than mostly due to the increasing impacts for human lives as well as the environment (Mellor 92). This urbanization phenomenon results in poor conditions of living and working while other negative effects are on environmental quality.
Compounded problems also affect most developing countries. The aspects of rising inequality result from the rapid trends of urbanization. The rapid urban growth drive and the efficiency leads decreased equitable urban development (Spence & Annez & Buckley 37). The think tanks propose policies encouraging labor-intensive procedures as a way of absorbing influxes of both low skilled and unskilled persons. For example, the problem for these migrant workers in Singapore is that there is increase in growth of slums. In other cases, the skilled or unskilled workers in the rural-urban migration cannot acquire jobs or afford housing within cities. This way, they have to live in the slums (McLean & Kromkowski 19). The urban problems, together with extensive infrastructure developments fuel suburbanization trends within the developing nations.
However, the trend for cities in many nations tends to become denser with time. Urbanization for this reason is a negative trend; however, there are many positives across the expenses reduction for commuting and transportation in improving job opportunities and access to transportation, housing, and education. Life in the cities allows individuals as well as families to embrace the proximity and diversity opportunities (Kornhauser 29). For example, in China, while cities have larger scopes of markets and goods as compared to the rural areas, there is more prevalence of high overhead costs, infrastructure congestion, monopolization, and inconvenience of trans-town trips to engage marketplace competition worse in cities than rural areas.
Further, the urbanization critics observe that many people moving to major cities in the past increase the competition levels for jobs. This also means that people with greatest capabilities remain in the cities. In other case, they are expected to work the jobs, which they wear them out so hard. These include works at construction sites as well as the dangers, which expose them to death (Gilleard & Higgs 27). Bigger cities face the overpopulation problems while the most obvious of this is the minimization of space for people livelihoods. People from the poor villages do not have a choice but live in areas places without clean drink water and electricity when moving to the urban areas. Others even engage themselves in acts of crime to earn a livelihood. This is because living in urban areas is rather expensive (Johnson 92). For example, the city expansion in Kenya leads to cutting down of trees for erecting buildings. The lowered amount of trees is linked to rapid drop in the environmental quality and severely damages the overall health of urban people.
These findings point at the need for policy alterations. They need to reassess the extensive contributions of public investment across all urban areas for purposes of poverty reduction. It is a tenet that such investments within countries are concentrated within rural areas as a way of reducing poverty (Cordner, Das & Cordner 56). The poor populations of most countries are especially concentrated there. To the extent, which urbanization has substantial poverty-reduction effects across the rural areas, most of the urban investments need to be important complements for the rural investments within strategies of rural poverty-reduction.
Works Cited
Cordner, Gary., Das, Dilip., Cordner, AnnMarie. Urbanization, Policing, and Security: Global Perspectives. New York: CRC Press, 2009. Print
Gilleard, Chris., Higgs, Paul. Contexts of Ageing: Class, Cohort and Community. New York: Polity, 2005. Print
Johnson, Eric. Urbanization and Crime: Germany 1871-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print
Kornhauser, William. Politics of Mass Society. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print
McLean, George., Kromkowski, John. Urbanization and Values. New York: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1991. Print
Mellor, J.R. Urban Sociology and Urbanized Society. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print
Spence, Michael., Annez, Patricia., Buckley, Robert. Urbanization and Growth. New York: World Bank Publications, 2009. Print
