The Twentieth Century Saw a Major Increase in the World

The twentieth century saw a major increase in the world’s population. Yet large parts of the globe remain uninhabitable, so people are drawn towards living in existing towns and cities. A result our modern day cities face a number of serious problems which are due to overcrowding. Cities teeming with people are put under great strain to supply housing, healthcare, education, jobs and a certain quality of life for the inhabitants. The consequence of too dense a population is that one or all of these areas must suffer.Owing to being over-peopled, Britain’s main cities all have a number of people living on the streets. Life must be extremely hard for these people and one effect of such a lifestyle is that drug abuse and crime rates rise. Cities are environmentally unfriendly places. This is because light, heat, travel and food must all be supplied artificially as one is removed from nature. Hence, the greater the population, the more natural resources are burnt up and, con sequently, the more pollution is created. A city crowded with people leads to roads crawling with cars.The effect of the consequent levels of carbon monoxide in the air is said to, in cities as crowded as Mexico City, be equivalent to smoking twenty cigarettes a day. Living in a city, therefore, forces us to be part of an unhealthy consumer throwaway society, which creates illness and environmental crisis, rather than curing it. It is the Government’s responsibility to find solutions for these problems. As a result a lot of taxpayer’s money is spent on trying to keep the effects of overcrowding under control. More housing is built, more roads are planned. This tactic might alleviate some systematic problems at high cost.However, it will never solve the problem of overpopulation. For this reason, we must look to the cause of the problem, which is simply an unchecked epidemic of people. Thus, governments must educate people to limit the size of their family. In China, co uples are penalize;, ed financially as a consequence of having more than one child. This may seem cruel, but the â€Å"one-child policy† is beginning to have an effect on the world’s most populous nation. Similar such policies may also be necessary in other overcrowded nations and this, in turn, would eventually result in solving the problem of overcrowding in cities.