To What Extent Can Urban Areas Be Sustainable.

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To What extent can Urban Areas be Sustainable? Urban sustainability is the idea that an urban area can function as normal and be organised without excessive reliance on its surrounding country side. It also suggests that urban areas should be developed so as to minimise the amount of non-renewable resources being used and also maximise efficiency within the city in terms of waste, pollution, transport and services. These problems are ever growing in large cities as they urbanise and due to large influxes of people living in the area, many cities experience overcrowding. This can lead to heavy traffic; vast amounts of waste, a lack of food, water and housing which are all the characteristics of an unsustainable city. However, these problems can be dealt with when a city has good urban planners, consolidative infrastructure and the capacity for change and development as demonstrated in the city of Stockholm, which shows that developing a sustainable city is possible. The city of Mumbai in India is highly unsustainable. Its population has increased by 10 million people in the past 30 years turning it into a mega city with a population of over 20 million people. Due to the rapid increase in population, the city has not had time to develop to the vast numbers of people who now inhabit it. Its roads experience heavy traffic consisting of cars, motorbikes and other motor vehicles; this leads to vast quantities of fossil fuels being burnt and subsequently pollution is at an all-time high. Furthermore, the 465km railway service in Mumbai is used by 2.64 billion people per year and is the busiest train system in the world. Clearly the transport in Mumbai is unsustainable but the problems could be solved through perhaps constructing an underground system of trains. This would reduce the huge crowds of people attempting to use the above ground train system per day and may

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