Question

"Growing Cities." Please respond to the following: Based on the lecture and Webtext materials, address the following: Examine the main reasons why people are attracted to urban areas in the developing world, and select the key issues that make this rural to urban migration such a difficult problem for governments to deal with.

Answer 1

The reason behind migration to the urban centres in developing world.

(a) Better wages / earning opportunities and thereby better quality of life, access to education, healthcare, sanitation and utilities.

(b) Better growth prospects owing to greater scope to showcase the skills, High number of potential consumers increase both job and entrepreneurship opportunities.

(c) Better prospects for higher education and grooming for the future generations, thereby, moving to cities is also considered as an investment.

(d) People's perception of the city life being better as compared to life in rural areas.

(e) Rural areas have only agriculture as the livelihood of the people. In developing countries, traditional methods of agriculture and uncertain monsoons plays havoc with the livelihood of people in many countries. In such scenario, more and more people like to do a job in cities, which has fair degree of certainty of wages at the end of each month, unlike the gamble of agriculture.

Government has to deal with many issues related to migration.

(a) Providing shelter, sanitation, healthcare and other civic amenities to a huge population, which is unable to afford costly options.

(b) Providing social security to the people which are among the most vulnerable.

(c) Dealing with law and order problems resulted out of culture shock, economic disparity and exploitation.

(d) Dealing with high pressure of population increase on the limited resources. This is crucial because the growth rate is unpredictable and even the best of plannings might fail.