AEP9 – ASSIGNMENT TWO: ESSAY

Immoderate expansion of urban area, known as ‘urban sprawl’, becomes a wide-spreading phenomenon in most countries nowadays. This is majorly due to the improvement of mobility at all levels and the great economic benefits lying behind the sprawled urban areas. However, urban sprawl not only degrades the environment and changes global climate, but also generates a number of social problems, such as polarization and inequality. To solve the problems resulting from urban sprawl, many international organizations put technology forward as the most efficient and economically feasible approach. This essay will outline how urban sprawl results in these problems and point out the risks of depending on technologies to address environmental issues as well as its limitation to solve the social ones.
In many countries in the world, urban sprawl imposes great stress on both of ecological and social well-being. In the first place, urban sprawl causes a lot of environmental problems. One of the burning issues for the international community is global warming. In order to support the running of current transportation, the utilities to warm or cool spacious houses and household appliances in neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities, energy mainly created by fossil fuels becomes greatly demanded, thus giving rise to higher emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, which is considered as one of the arch-criminals causing global warming (Gonzalez, 2005). Besides climate change, other environmental problems, such as loss of forests and farmland, loss of architecture diversity and higher levels of noise, also result from the over expansion of cities. In addition to ecological impacts, urban sprawl arouses quite a few social conundrums like social inequality. For the urban sprawls with the improvement of mobility, in some motorized countries