There are a large number of people who move to metropolitan areas in search of better job opportunities and living conditions. This process is called urbanization which is featured by a faster increase of urban population and economic development compared with rural areas. In spite of economic growth and improvement of basic facilities, cities, especially in developing countries, suffer from negative consequences of urbanization and postindustrialization. It is evident that modern cities are featured by environmental degradation, worsening of water quality and shortages of housing. This essay will focus on the air pollution and water pollution caused by urbanization. These harmful pollutants have serious negative effects on people’s health such as damage to people’s respiratory system. Following this, it will put forward some feasible solutions to deal with these problems.
The air quality in cities has become worse and worse along with the process of urbanization and people have been suffering from serious respiratory problems. A typical example of this is the “smokfog” phenomenon in Beijing where people need to wear a gauze mask to go outside. It is true that the working offices or central business districts are located in the downtown area of the city and a large number of people crowded into the center of the city for work or for entertainment. As a result, there is a huge population who take public transportation to travel to workplace and some wealthier five-to-nine workers choose to go for work by private cars. Therefore, the exhausted gas produced by these transportation tools is immeasurable, especially on the workdays. This also causes a huge pollution difference between workday and weekend and this effect that less pollution is caused in the holiday period is called “Holiday Effect”. Tan et al (2013) argues that pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds or
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