Chapter 7 Sustainable Cities Flashcards
What is a city?
Cities have large population size compared to other locations in the country, a high population density, built-up areas with extensive infrastructure providing water, electricity, sanitation, telecommunications and transport for its residences. They also serve a range of functions or activities such as administrative function, commercial and educational activities. EXAMPLE : Jakarta plays an important administrative function and economic function.
What is the relationship between rural areas and cities?
Cities depend on rural areas for much of their food supply as cities do not have sufficient land for agricultural purposes.
Rural-Urban migration?
Rural - Urban migration occurs when people move from the rural areas to urban areas due to push and pull factors, push factors being unemployment issues and poor healthcare services, while pull factors refer to the abundance of jobs and the better living conditions.
Benefits of living in a city?
EDUCATION INTO WORK…?
Education. Education equips the people with useful knowledge and skills which can be applied when they gain employment, where they can then earn an income. With this income obtained, they can purchase food and other neccesisities to improve their well-being.
Benefits of living in a city?
EDUCATION OPPORTUNITES…?
Cities are centres of learning, housing large populations of children, younng people of school going age and adults who wish to pursue lifelong learning. Due to these reasons, cities are home to variety of educational instituitions, such as vocational schools and universities that cater to many different interests.
Benefits of living in a city?
BUSINESSES THRIVE…?
Businesses thrive in cities ddue to the developed infrastructure, availability of services and opportunities such as quality education. This allows businesses to hire directly from a large pool of skilled employees and may even offer work-study arrangements in the form of interships with educational instituitions to train their employees.
Benefits of living in a city?
TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS…?
Cities are known for their technological innovation, which is the use of scientific knowledge to create new products or services. This is largely due to the fact that there are so many skilled people such as researchers, designers and entrepreneurs in the cities as well as having funding from the government of investors for these skilled people to experiment with new and upcoming innovations.
Water pollution?
Water supplies in cities are often affected by the improper management of both household and industrial waste due to the inadequate or broken sewage systems. When waste is disposed improperly or leaked into waterways, water quality is reduced and threatens both human and aquatic life.
Air pollution?
In a survey conducted by the WHO, it is shown that more than 80% of the world’s urban population faces air pollution. Prolonged exposure to such air pollution can lead to health issues such as respiratory infection, lung or heart disease and in severe cases, even death. With this surge in poor health, it would lead to an increased demand for healthcare services, resulting in even more money needing to be expended in order to hire more healthcare staff in order to supply this increased demand.
Competition for land resources?
Cities require large amounts of land in order to accomadate the ever growing population the city for many different purposes. If the land is scarce, cities may need expand towards the rural areas of parts of the current city could be rebuilt to use land more efficiently.
Competition for water?
Cities need to meet the continual supply of clean water for individuals and businesses. However, construction and expansion of the reservoirs are restricted by the competition for land while water catchment areas and groundwater are also affected as more natural vegetation is converted into concrete surfaces. EXAMPLE : In July 2018, the city officials of CAPE TOWN turned off the water taps for businesses and homes. This was because the water levels in the reservoirs had dropped to dangerously low levels as a result of the high population growth, people’s consumption habits and prolonged drought.
Why do we need management of the physical environment?
Cities need to be managed properly as they have large envrionemntal footprints where large amounts of waste and pollutants are released into the physical envrionment, leading to the environmental pollution. This drastically reduces the quality of the physical environment and its sustainability. These management strategies are needed ot regulate the use of natural resources and minimise the negative environmental impact from human impact.
How can we sustainably manage cities?
EXAMPLE SECTION (TO PREVENT WATER POLLUTION)
TO PREVENT WATER POLLUTION, farms have set up drains around their farm plots to channel and collect the rainwater and excess nutrients.
REDUCING AIR POLLUTION THROUGH…
REDUCING AIR POLLTION THROUGH LAWS. City governments have passed laws to regulate people’s actions and industrial activities, as well as setting limits on air pollutants for industries and vehicles.
EXAMPLE OF REDUCING AIR POLLUTION THROUGH LAWS
Since 2013, Chinese cities of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei have adopted the Air Pollution and Control Action Plan to enact laws such as Envrionmental Protection and Air pollution Prevention and Control. The city governments have implemented a license plate lottery to limit the number of new vehicles that can be registered and a vehicle regsitration rule, limiting the use of private cars to selected days in the week according to the last number of their license plates.
