Essay On Urbanisation

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Introduction
In the last decades, urbanisation has become a phenomenon on a global scale. In 1995, the number of people living in urban areas was approximately 2.4 billion and estimated to double in 30 years (Antrop, 2000). The rapid urbanisation might produce an undesirable outcome for the natural environment. Brown (2001) showed that cities were accounted for nearly 80% of carbon emissions, 60% of water used daily for people and 76% of manufactured timber. Therefore, we need to understand the transition process between rural-urban areas and current land use patterns, in order to use our resources more efficiently. The main purpose of this study is to obtain crucial information of structural features in different levels of urbanisation in …show more content…

About 10 km away from the city, the percentage of vegetation cover in Melbourne, London and Shenyang increased notably by 15%, 37% and 14% respectively. When the distance was risen by 10 km, it went down to 17%, 27% and 4% respectively. At the point of 40 km, the tree coverage in Melbourne kept going down to 2%, whereas that in both London and Shenyang rocketed to 53%. The percent cover of canopy of New Delhi, however, had a different trend as it kept plummeting from 61% in the city to 34% in 10 km from the city, down to 15% in 20 km from the city and then slightly increased to 20% at the location 40 km away from the city. Table 2 - Percentage of building cover at different distances from the city centre in Melbourne (diamonds), London (dots), Shenyang (squares) and New Delhi (triangles). Google Earth imagery was used to obtain coverage data.
In contrast to tree coverage, building coverage of Melbourne, London and Shenyang started from city centre with relatively high percentage: 57%, 70% and 58% respectively (Table 2) and then gradually decreased for the next 20 kilometres, except for London with a slight rise at 20 km location. The building cover of New Delhi began with 6% in the city centre and then moderately built up to 35% when 20 km point was reached. All four cities witnessed a plummet of building coverage at the area 40 km from …show more content…

(2008), the dominance of impermeable areas over green spaces would introduce the urban heat island (UHI) effect, in this case, to Melbourne, London and Shenyang. McPherson et al. (1994) indicated that UHI had negative impacts on hydrologic system, air quality, human wellbeing and general ecosystem health. Oke et al. (1997) suggested that UHI be alleviated by expanding tree canopy coverage and albedo, but Grimm et al. (2008) added that this solution had a high demand for water, especially in dry climate.
It should be noted that the methodology of using randomly generated points to measure land uses had some certain advantages and disadvantages. Surveyors could quickly gain insights of land uses of a particular area. However, the surveyed areas of this study were relatively small (4 km2) due to time and resources constraint, compared to the area of the whole cities. Therefore, the results might not be generalised for the entire cities.

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