Discuss the solutions implemented by governments of developing nations to deal with the issues of rapid urbanisation

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Discuss the solutions implemented by governments of developing nations to deal with the issues of rapid urbanisation. How successful have these solutions been? [40 marks]

In many developing countries such as India and Brazil today, there has been a huge increase in the amount of urbanisation taking place. Urbanisation is when a higher proportion of the population in a country are living in urban areas rather than rural areas. This is mainly caused by the process of industrialisation, where new industries are being created and the country is going through economic growth. Industrialisation leads to many new job openings being created, and many people move to urban areas in order to fill these jobs. Rapid urbanisation, however, brings with it many problems such as an increased demand for housing, an increase in pollution & crime and transport issues and this is due to the incredibly quick rate at which it happens, giving the country less time to adapt to these changes. In order to combat these issues, the governments for these countries have had to come up with many different solutions, which will be outlined below. Some of these solutions are more effective than others.

One area that was studied is Lagos, a city found in Nigeria. Lagos is the second fastest growing city in Africa, and the seventh fastest in the world. Lagos has a serious problem with crime but despite this, there are no reliable statistics on the trend and pattern of crime and victimisation. On lower levels of society, there are ‘area boys’, organised gangs who specialise in mugging and small-scale drug dealing. When trying to combat the problem of crime, the government employed the help of the company Spatial Technologies Ltd. This company provides Nigeria with mapping and GIS provision has helped develop a competition to develop one solution to Lagos’ major crime problems. The competition invites the people of Nigeria to enter their online map-based Crime Reporting app development competition to create an innovative online map-based solution that helps victims or witnesses of muggings and street attacks in Lagos report these incidents by using Google maps. Google maps can pinpoint exactly where they reported the crime and can provide additional details of the incident including pictures. This competition can provide hundreds of ideas for victims and witnesses to be able to report crime incidents across Lagos, to the wider internet audience. In an interview with police correspondent, Andrew Utulu, he said that in order to prevent crime, he is actively encouraging police to be made visible, explaining that by making police visible, a criminal is less likely to commit any crimes. Furthermore, the Lagos departments of police are improving their logistics by improving fighting vehicles like armoured vehicle carriers. They are also increasing training for officers on weapon handling. Finally, there has been an increase in CCTV in stores and public places. I feel that these attempts to lower crime rates were successful to an extent. When looking at the statistics regarding crimes committed in Lagos, you can see there has been a slight reduction in the percentage of particular crimes being committed, but not in others. For example, in a survey, 52% of the respondents in the survey lost someone to murder in 2000, but in 2004, this had been drastically reduced to 4%. Also, the CCTV has not only helped the police to find who is responsible for some criminal acts, but it has also significantly reduced crime rates. However, in the survey, 32% of the respondents had been victims of a vehicle hijack in 2000, but in 2004, this has increased to 48%, showing that, despite the solutions implemented, crime is still a major problem in Lagos.

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Another city that was studied was Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. It is situated near the coast in the Chao Phraya River delta. The city has a population of over 8 million, making it the most populated city in the country. As a result, Bangkok suffers heavily from traffic, and this problem has been getting increasingly worse. This can be shown by the number of vehicles registered in Bangkok between 1980 and 1990. In 1980, there were 578,767 registered vehicles and this rapidly increased to 2,336,531 registered vehicles in 1990. This causes great costs in the sense of ...

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