The urbanisation process

Today I’m going ton analyse two documents. The first is a photo entitled «  Birds eye view of the world highest capital : La Paz. » La paz is the capital of Bolivia. In this photo we can see a lot of buildings of varying sizes that look rather old. The second document is also a photo entitled « Urban sprawl in South Los Angeles ». It comes from « Google Earht ». In this picture we can see many houses, 2 green spaces and a lot of roads and motorways. These 2 photos are probably aglomerations from La Paz for the first document and Los Angeles for the second document.

We’re goiging to ask ourselves how these pictures reflect the urbanization process.

First, urban sprawl is when the population of a city becomes dispersed over an increasingly large geographical area. The urban spraw is a consequence of urbanisation (increasing proportion of people living in built environments such as towns an cities) also a consequence of metropolisation (selective process that favours the already most powerful and dynamic urban area). Urban sprawl occurs because cities are attractive. Indeed, they offer many services such as work, cultural activities, shopping… Towns then had to build large numbers of homes to accommodate the new inhabitants. This can be seen in both documents, as there are many buildings and houses spread over a large area. However, not all parts of the world are equal when it comes to this phenomenon. Not all cities have the same wealth, and so cannot guarantee the same quality of life everywhere in the world. We can see this in the photos. We know that Bolivia is a developing country. The first document shows an unorganised city and suggests that the inhabitants are living in poor conditions, as the buildings look old. In contrast, Los Angeles is located in the United States, which is a developed country. So there's a big difference between these two photos, since document 2 shows part of the city organised with infrastructures such as motorways and parks to make life easier for the inhabitants. We can therefore say that there are social inequalities between people living in different countries because they do not live in the same conditions. For example, people in developing countries have to commute long distances to work, to shop… while in developed countries infrastructure is being created to facilitate these moves.

Moreover, urban sprawl also has ecological consequences. Cities are growing and expanding, leaving no room for green spaces. However, we note that there are also inequalities between developed and developing countries on this subject, since developed countries have the money to create green spaces such as parks. We can see this in the second photo, where 2 parks have been created. Urban sprawl also leads to noise and air pollution, with a large population concentrated in a small area. Indeed, we can see that the houses and buildings in the two photos are very close together.

To conclude, these documents show us the urbanization process with the phenomena of urban sprawl which is different and has different consequences for people in different countries.

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