Cross Cultural Collaboration
A large part of understanding and analyzing an issue is hearing what people from different cultures and backgrounds have to say about it. So what are some of the various opinions on the issue of rapid vs planned urbanization?
To gather data from different perspectives, we interviewed people from five countries: India, Russia, Nigeria, Germany and Mongolia
From Russia with Love
To the left, we have an interview with one of the students at Oberoi International School, named Kainaz Patravala. Kainaz has lived in Russia for a collective period of about 10-11 years and graciously chose to give us her perspective on the issue of rapid vs planned urbanization. In the interview, she talks about how she feels that the negative aspects of urbanization outweigh the positives. She also said that she witnessed rapid urbanization to a certain extent in her final years in Russia. From these statements, as well as a conversation we had with her off camera, we gathered the following data: the reason she feels that the negatives of urbanization are greater than the positives, is probably due to the fact that rapid urbanization is the only form of urbanization she has seen in the last few years, living in Mumbai, a city known for suffering the consequences of unplanned urbanization. We also noticed that she mentioned how she found Russia to be cleaner than Mumbai. This provides us with an interesting perspective because while many consider Russia to be a financially-ruined country, it has still managed to maintain a higher standard of urban living than many places in India. However, a direct comparison would be unfair since Russia's population is 143.5 million people, a paltry number in comparison to India's nearly 1.25 billion people. To add to that, Russia's surface area is more than 5 times that of India, thus helping alleviate the problem of a high population density which causes a lot of the problems associated with rapid urbanization. Nevertheless, the interview provided us with a fresh perspective on the topic which aided our understanding and analysis of the topic.
A Message from Mongolia
Key Findings
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After interviewing several people from different backgrounds, we found that although there were differences in certain parts of each perspective, there were also many similarities when it came to what people think of urbanization.
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They all had similar definitions of what it was (people moving to big cities from villages), and what it brought along (big buildings, more jobs, slums).
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Older age group participants gave more realistic views of urbanization than younger age groups. For example, they emphasized on how urbanization must be planned for it to have a positive impact on society, and that without urban planning, cities can begin to experience negative externalities such as slums, decaying infrastructure, widespread poverty, etc.