Essay On Advantages And Disadvantages Of Urbanization

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, only 16 cities in the world-majority in advanced industrialized countries contained a million people or more. Today, almost 400 cities contain a million people or more and about seventy percent of them are found in the developing world” (Cohen, 2006:64). Many urban areas have experienced rapid growth over the last 20years, as a result of increasing population growth and transformation of the world’s economy by a combination of rapid political and technological change. About half of the world’s total population resides in urban areas. Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it. This essay will discuss how the potential benefits of urbanization far outweigh the disadvantages and how the challenge lies in exploiting its possibilities. It will also offer some examples to support the argument.

Growing urbanization and the concentration of poverty:

Due to urbanization there is more congestion in many large cities which can be

High population density implies low per capita cost of providing basic services and infrastructure. Even though there are high rates of poverty in many cities, urban residents, on average, enjoy better access health care, education and other basic public services such as water, electricity compared to the people in rural areas. As the cities grow they become more complex to manage. Some of the concerns include the pressures imposed on the natural environment, natural resources and individual’s rights. One may argue that rapid urban growth in the developing world has outstripped the capability of most cities to provide sufficient basic services for people but despite limited resources, cities are fighting and working on a daily basis, in order to reduce the poverty levels of citizens and offer them better standards of living with abundant opportunities (Cohen,