Essays on Urbanization

Smart growth is about making communities better as they grow so that they are not only more environmentally responsible, but also more vibrant, beautiful and fulfilling for the people who live in them (Ewing, 2005). Being smart about growth means revitalizing existing cities and suburbs...

Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is a coastal city northwest of Java Island with a dense population of nearly 10.7 million. Flooding and landslides occur frequently near the coastlines, and this is largely from human activity through urbanization (Abidin et al., 2012). Urban sprawl is...

Tokyo, located at the head of Tokyo Bay on the Pacific coast of eastern central Honshu, is one of the largest megacities in the world, with a population of over 13.9 million people, as well as Japan’s political, cultural and economic centre. During the process...

This essay will examine urbanization in China by starting with a brief background of urbanization in Asia, specifically comparing it with Western countries. Then, it will focus on three specific issues – air pollution, public transit and “left-behind” children and elderly people – that have...

Health plays a major role in our everyday lives, and with poor health we tend to look for the main causes. From the health perspective, Americans and the Chinese are greatly affected because of the air, water, and soil pollution caused by the developing manufacturers....

After three decades of double-digit growth, slowdown due to a diminishing technological gap and a declining working age population has furnished a compelling need for the 18th third plenum this year. The Party’s so-called “383 Scheme” provides a potential roadmap for a much more open...

The urbanization process of Chinese megacities has witnessed a variety of forms and paces since the marketing and the commodification of housing in the 1980s. One of the most remarkable phenomena is the transformation of agricultural land into urban areas through the formation of urban...

Migration of population to the cities is increasing rapidly worldwide because the birth rate is increasing, rural people tend to move to city in search of better living conditions, due to conflicts and limited amount of resources in rural areas. Urban population has experienced a...

The urban modernisation narrative calls to replace the native urban poor with a new class of people who will uphold the world-city ambitions projected by Bangalore’s government. Indeed, India’s land dispossession and booming property investments are not occurring in its city centres, rather on the...

Cities are “spatial manifestations of broader social forces and struggles”, contained and shaped by their built environment. Industrial capitalist modernity has been the driving force behind city development, and the commodification of ‘place’ has resulted into cities being ‘converted into products to be sold in...