Class: 14E15 Group: 1Members: Trần Thu Hằng, Nguyễn Mạnh Linh, Kang Ji Su

THEME: CITIESLECTURE SUMMARY

Our changing cities

In “Our changing cities”, the lecturer discusses the mass urbanization of the world population. His presentation includes two parts: the reasons why people are moving to cities and three major changes in cities.In the first part, the writer mentions two main causes for the movement of society to cities. The first point is about economy. In the past, farming is the main source of employment. Nowadays, employment focuses on information technology, manufacturing and service and centers in or around big cities. Hence, urban dwellers have more chances to find jobs and earn money. The second reason is that people always have intension of finding for a comfortable and convenient life. Indeed, cities with better material conditions, namely schools, transportation networks and entertainment… are effortlessly luring more and more individuals. In the second part, three major changes in cities are mentioned. First, they are becoming bigger and bigger. In the past, there are not many cities which have population of ten million people. However, today many cities have population of roughly 20 million inhabitants, and megalopolises like these will increase in the future. The second change of cities is their shape changings. It means cities become taller with high buildings, skyscrapers and usually expand in an uncontrolled way. In addition, the cities’ form changing is also showed in the linking cities to each other. The final change is cities are breaking up into smaller communities often by ethnic group and income level. Citizens often stay in their community and do not regularly contact with others from different background.Nowadays, the difficult challenge cities are dealing with is improving life condition, especially decreasing slum areas or ghetto where people live in very poor condition.

Word count: 274