Dissertation de géographie

Over the years, cities have been expanding and developing, but when a city grows, it is not always sustainable development. The expansion of a city is called urban sprawl which is the spreading of urban developments on undeveloped areas around a city. Sustainable development is when a city can sustain the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services upon which the economy and society depend while achieving human development goals. The whole world, especially in the past century, endured urban sprawl while concerns about sustainable development have grown. Cities have been expanding, but they don’t always prioritize sustainable development, how was the world affected by that? And what are the solutions? First of all, cities have gone through urban sprawl during their development, which was sometimes challenging. Second of all, concerning sustainable development, cities who are expanding now think about quick development before sustainable development. Third of all, because the concerns about the future of humanity are growing, cities have thought about solutions to make their development more sustainable.

There has been some issues with the quick urban growth in the world in the past few decades, although the urban population growth has been slowing down in developed countries, it is still solid in developing countries. There are multiple reasons why this is happening. The first one being that because of rural development, which is the process of improving social and economic life in rural areas, more people move to the suburbs, because this is where they can find jobs. The cities expand then as more and more people live around creating a bigger city. Megacities are forming, a city with more than 10 million inhabitants, all around the world. These Megacities create Megalopolis, which are a continuum of urban areas that consist of several towns, like BosWash that goes from Boston to Washington DC on the eastern coast. This Megalopolis has a population over 44 million people. There are other Megalopolis in the world, and there will be more because the world population will increase in the next few years. Natural growth is the second reason why population growth is still increasing in developing countries. Natural growth is the percentage of how much a population grows in a given time, in percentage, by subtracting the percentage of death rates in the country over a year, from the percentage of birth rates over a year. The annual natural growth rate can show us how much the country’s population is growing each year. For example, the annual natural growth rate of

the United Kingdom was 1.1 percent in 2002 and the annual growth rate of India was 17 percent in 2002, which is 15.5 times more than the U.K. This shows that developing countries, like India, have a higher growth rate than developed countries, like the United Kingdom. This can be explained by the fact that developing countries have entered their demographic transition after developed countries because developed countries had their industrial and medical revolutions way before developing countries which also makes developed countries richer. Urban growth happened everywhere but is now slowing down in developed countries, it is still strong in developing countries which can lead to social and environmental problems, which then does not make it sustainable development.

The increasing world population has led to the expansion of cities. In developing, cities are developing fast to keep up with the population growth. As they are rapidly developing, they prioritize the development of the city over the well-being of the people and the environment. For example, in La Paz, there are some social inequalities. The wealthiest live in the suburbs, where all the jobs are and the poorest live in less attractive places which are sometimes degraded. Cities may gather a lot of people; they also separate them. It is called socio-spatial segregation (poor vs. rich). In the Manhattan village in California,

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