Lecture 2

THEME 2: City
Bullet sum:
Topic: mass urbanization of the world’s population
• 2 reasons people move to cities
- find jobs and earn money
- better living condition
• 3 changes in cities
- increase population
- change in shape (infrastructure)
- breaking into small communities
-> biggest challenge: improve quality of life in cities
Full transcript:
Good morning and welcome to today’s lecture. Today we’re going to discuss
the mass urbanization of the world’s population which is an unprecedented trend
worldwide. I’d like you to take a look at the first handout which is part of a class
study published by Ebenezer Howard a century ago. It shows three magnets
representing what he calls town, country and town-country. You’ll see
immediately that he lists pros and cons for each environment. For example, the
country has beauty of nature but long hours and low wages. The town has social
opportunity but isolation. What interesting about the three magnets is that also it
was written in 1898, it identified many of the same reasons that many people are
still being pulled away from rural area and into urban environments. (end audio 1)
In this lecture, I’ll focus on 2 major reasons why people are moving to cities.
Well, the first reason is economic. People are moving to the cities because that’s
where they can find jobs and earn money. Until the 20th century, the major source
of employment full and part-time was farming. However, the need for people to
work on the land gets less and less as we are able to do more and more things by
machine. Now no more than 50% of all jobs are connected to farming. Jobs now
are being created and information technology manufacturing and service areas
such as tourism and financing. And all of these new jobs are in or around major
cities. The second reason for the move to cities has to do with quality of life’s
issues, comfort and convenience. For example, most of us would like our children
to receive a good education, and cities often offer better schools. And then for
many, city’s life is just more comfortable. There are transportation networks, shops
and places of entertainment. An interesting consequence of urbanization is that the
average age of people in the countryside is increasing, while that of the city’s is
falling. More old people stay in the countryside than young people, and the
opposite is true in the cities. This is of course connected to the fact that is the
young people who want jobs.
Now I’d like to identify three key changes in our cities. First of all, they’re
getting bigger and bigger. For the first time in history, there will soon be more
people living in urban areas than in rural environments. Think about that for a
minute. Most cities are bigger now and ever before. Tokyo, Mexico, Bombay, Sao
Paulo are among the largest cities in the world. And each of the cities will soon
have approximately 20 million people. In 1950, New York city was the only city
with the population of 10 million. For the first time in the history of society, we
now have many cities with population of over 10 million people - what we call
megacities. Tokyo, Mexico, Bombay and Sao Paulo are just a few examples of
today’s megacities. And experts say that the number of megacities will increase in
the future. Cities are not just getting bigger. They’re also changing shape. They’re
getting taller because land is getting more and more expensive. So instead of
having a few big houses on a piece of land, we can have a tall apartment building
that a thousand people can live in. All of you can probably think a building or a
park or a store that has been torn down to make room for bigger, taller or more
modern buildings. Skyscrapers have become a symbol of modern cities. Like the
recently constructed Taipei 101 Tower in Taiwan. Now it’s the tallest building in
the world – 1674 ft high. Cities are also changing in shape in other ways. Look at
handout 2, the concentric is all model represents the structure of some cities built
at the beginning of the 20th century. The business district is in the center,
surrounded by the other zones. But the sector model and the multiple nuclei model
are probably more typical of the cities we know today. They show the urban
sprawl that occurring in contemporary cities. Urban sprawl basically means that
cities are spreading out, often in an uncontrolled way. Noticed that in these two
models, the business district is close to all the other districts. Another change in the
shape of cities is that cities now tend to become linked to each other, like Osaka,
Kobe, Kyoto in Japan, which is a huge combined population. This sprawl often
occurs in random and unpredictable ways, and has a huge impact on the quality of
lives of city’s residents. The third change is that our cities are breaking up into
smaller communities, often by ethnic groups or income level. Of course, many
cities do have a kind of identity or personality, but a city is not homogeneous. For
example, migrants to the city often want to live in their own communities or with
people from the similar cultural background. Another example is that if you’re
moving from a smaller community to a city, you will be most likely to move close
to friends or family members who will help you get a job or give you support.
However, this often means that people stay within their community and do not
come into contact with others from different backgrounds.
How is city continue to change in the future? Well, we can predict that cities
will continue to grow in the future. The biggest challenge facing us now is to
improve the quality of life in cities because, sadly, they don't always offer
economic security, the safety, or the comfort they promise. Many cities have slum
areas or ghettos where people live in dangerous or destitute conditions. The
beautiful architecture and vibrant nightlife are one face of the city, but cities also
have problems of inequality, crowding and poverty.

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THEME 2: City

Topic: mass urbanization of the world’s population

• 2 reasons people move to cities

- find jobs and earn money

- better living condition

- change in shape (infrastructure)

- breaking into small communities

-> biggest challenge: improve quality of life in cities

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