Increasing Environmental-Urban Challenges: Social-Anthropological Analysis

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Professor of sociology, Department of Social Sciences Alzahra university

Abstract

The present article tries discovering and reflecting the environmental challenges and issues of the urban space. The various urban communities are faced with different types of environmental-urban issues and this is per se in need of common solutions. Issues like water and land are currently being frequently seen especially in the cities of the developing countries. Similarly, the supply of the citizens’ financial needs is amongst the challenges increasingly reflected and manifested in the urban communities. The emergence of a set of urban challenges would be per se followed by novel and newly emerging issues. Considering the increase in the city dwelling population, these spots need new management and adoption of effective plans and policies. Following the increase in the world’s population since the second half of the twentieth century on and following the change in the population’s lifestyle, particularly the city-dwellers, these citizens have encountered new and unprecedented challenges and any hesitation in responding to their needs would be per se accompanied by new and more problems for them. During the three past centuries, the city’s health and comfortability have been largely jeopardized. The qualitative and quantitative changes in the city’s population during the era after industrial revolution rendered the cities themselves vulnerable from various respects in such a way that various organizations have to be coherently in search of a cure and solution to such problems. While only sixteen cities worldwide had populations above one million people until 1900, the number of cities with multi-million populations has increased since then and this has per se directly influenced the ascending trend of the urban challenges. Although there are numerous urban challenges, environmental problems are more widely observed than the other bottlenecks.
 

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