Urbanization Outline

With increasing number of people moving to cities from rural areas, the phenomenon of urbanization raised public awareness. Reasons for people to move around are various, like getting high-paid jobs, better living conditions and more convenient transport. With the development of urbanization, an increasing number of problems have shown in several aspects in people’s daily life, which can degenerate urbanization and lead to serious consequences, such as illness, poor living condition, traffic jam and climate change. However, in response to the issues mentioned above, sustainable actions can be taken to reduce the negative impact to some extend, like proclaiming housing policy and building efficient and effective traffic system. Sustainable development seeks to improve the quality of human life without undermining the quality of our natural environment(Adams, 1993). It not only meets the needs of the present, but also does no harm to the future generation’s benefit. (Brundtland cited in Adams, 1999, p.43). This article will outline the sustainable actions can be taken to deal with urbanization issues and evaluate how they work on the problems. Actions like proclaiming housing policy and building efficient and effective traffic system may have different impact on solving the issues.

Housing problems are existing both in developed and developing countries, however, the problems appeared in different ways due to the city patterns and policies. Even though many high-rise buildings and modern facilities have been established in HongKong, we can’t ignore that rundown areas and the black spots are still exciting. The city is overcrowding and lack of space for normal amenities. After the Second World War, in 1945, the population in HongKong was just 601,000 and then the figure rose up to 2.2 million in 1950, due to the immigration from mainland China(Chaffy,1994). The land of HongKong became limited for such large population, as a result, pressure has been shown on housing in HongKong. As a result, squatter settlements appeared and were built on the edge of urban areas , rooftops, shelter bays of coastlines and island. Referring to the map (Figure3.38), it shows squatter settlements are established in the majority of the land in HongKong. If there was not enough land to establish well-managed communities, the living condition will be worrying. Because the government does not take the actions to limit the existence of the illegal housing and even set special areas for homes for the homeless, squatters has increased the junks and sampans in HongKong and boat squatters became a difficult problem to control.

To release the housing pressure, start from 1954, HongKong government took actions through three phases. They built high-rise public housing mainly in peripheral urban areas. From 1974 to now, the government focused on the New Town and the New Territory and got some improvement by developing mass and efficient transport system. The table shows。。。