Urbanisation

ASSIGNMENT  SUBMISSION

EDINBURGH NAPIER  UNIVERSITY

Urbanisation Portfolio task.

Introduction

With the development of the economy and science, more and more people move from rural areas to cities. People benefit from facilities in cities such as positive education, medical facilities, high-level income and convenient transport system. However, urbanization also brings a significant number of problems. This essay will discuss some problems of urbanisation and provides possible solutions to those issues. Firstly, people have prodigious work stress when they live in the city. The governments should provide some job vacancies and job training for the people. Secondly, traffic jams are serious and common phenomenon, and governments need to improve traffic management. Finally, the pollution is very serious in the city such as air pollution and noise pollution. Therefore, people should reduce use of fossil fuel.  

The definition of urbanisation is a process that is people gathered together (Tisdale, 1942). There are many causes of urbanisation. For instance, people move home from countryside to cities, they can earn higher salaries and have more job opportunities. In city, there are more factories to provide better work environment, which is able to ensure a high quality life. In addition, people can enjoy convenient public transport systems, and they have more healthcare facilities. The cities provide a wide variety of cultural activities. Such as, concert halls, museums and art galleries. Another attraction in city for rural people is education, not only for themselves to develop their working skills, but also for their children to get more advanced education (Purvis, 2015).

The influence of urbanization is a double-edged sword. Even people are benefit from healthcare, sanitation, and secure nutrition of urbanization. However, there is a problem caused by urbanization that people have a significant amount of work stress, such as long hours, work overload, time pressure, difficult or complex tasks, lack of breaks, lack of variety, and poor physical work conditions (Michie,2002). First of all, long work time cause working stress, which influences people health. There still exist many evils of overcrowding, pollution, social deprivation, crime, and stress. It could cause health problems, including hypertension, heart disease, obesity, diabetes and asthma (Godfrey and Julien,2005). Many people have to pursue certain numbers of job vacancy. With the global economic crisis, more and more work competitions appear in the city. They will face serious working pressure than before.  The Office of National Statistics pointed that the recent figures of unemployment is 8.1% in UK (Morris,2012). There are a number of people need to find a job, or they will face stress to earn a living to support their family. There is a significant solution that a number of job vacancies and job training provided by the government will help people to find a suitable occupation. The governments should introduce some policies to invest money and energy in sanitation, health facilities and employment (Godfrey and Julien,2005). As for individuals, they should participate in family activities more. It not only helps them to release their stress,but also is able to spend leisure time together and improve family relationship.

Nowadays, people can get lots of benefit from urbanization. However the problem of traffic jams still makes urban planners feel confused. First of all, it is quite inconvenient that people need to spend more time and energy on commuting time to arrive their destination. Urbanization leads to long distance between people’s home and their work place, and automotive vehicles are more affordable than last few years. Therefore, there is large numbers of automotive vehicles within roads of city, which often causes of traffic jams by a large drop in the average speed of the moving automotive vehicles (Kala and Warwick, 2014).Furthermore, traffic jams are a certain factor which causes road accidents. The narrow space in road is easily caused of crash. It put people in danger, even likely to endanger their life. For example, over a million people die due to road accidents in the world (Chakrabartty and Gupta, 2014). Both the government and society must put more effort into finding a proper solution to the issue of traffic jams as soon as possible. For instance, the transport sector should provide real-time traffic information to drivers, which help drivers avoid congested roads and choose alternative routes. It is a useful way to ease traffic jams and helps people to avoid the morning rush hour (Kala and Warwick, 2014). What is more, the government needs to strength traffic control, which includes more advanced traffic signalling devices need to be installed. That is able to control congestion and decrease traffic accidents ((Chakrabartty and Gupta, 2014)).There is an important point that problems of congestion and accidents are really tough problems to change. Every individual should follow traffic rules, society needs to enhance public awareness of traffic and the government has to punish people who violate traffic rules, which ensures a better future of traffic in the city.