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Urban Sprawl and Motorisation

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Urban sprawl and motorization have led to significant environmental and social problems. Suggestions have been made by various groups to solve these problems. Do some solutions work more efficiently than others?

Urban sprawl, first originated from the US, in the second half of the 19th century, now has become a global phenomenon that is in the center of many different organizations – political, environmental and social groups due to its considerable harmful effects, mainly on ecology and sociology as most people believe. The main causes of this big-scale mass migration to the city outskirts were the birth of the automobile, affordability of fossil fuels, development of infrastructure – specifically the roads and its mass usage and production now referred to as motorization.
As it was at the beginning and still is now, the driving force for this process of moving out of city resulting in bigger houses, individualized and privatized cars, vast transportation facilities, and greater contribution to the carbon dioxide emissions was the economical, rather than social, which actually government and business groups possessed interest in as it was fertile environment for their businesses. “Automobile manufacturers, gasoline producers, utilities, and the makers of home appliances have come to rely on the sprawled urban form to create and expand markets for their products” (Gonzalez, G.A, 2005, “Urban Sprawl, Global Warming and The Limits of Ecological Modernization”, Environmental Politics, 14:3, pp. 34-362). These active enrollments from profit-driven groups undoubtedly played central role in converting people to the mega-consumers whose indirect usage of natural resources such as fossil fuel and landscape are exorbitant, which, in turn, lead to Global warming, threatening issue of our planet.
On the one side, for the part of the society who could afford their

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