Some people think that the best way to reduce the time spent in travelling to work is to replace parks and gardens close to the city centre with apartment buildings for commuters, but others disagree. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.
The message from the given statement is straightforward. That is if we replace parks and gardens in a city with apartments, people living there will take less time to get to their workplaces. Indeed, it is a matter of physics; the shorter the distance between the workplace is, the less time it will take to go back and forth. However, if the conversation goes to a point of claiming that such an argument could justify more need for apartments and less demand for greens, one may disagree, completely. The personal view on this issue siding with the opponents will follow.
Ever since the industrial revolution, people have poured into cities to find an opportunity. To market to the job-hopefuls and workers, other types of business other than the industries itself sprung up and those are restaurants, cafes and hotels and so forth. That is, the business has a knock-on effect, creating other types of businesses in a city and the city now needs a place to cram people in which is an apartment. Economists call these effects network. It is once you gather enough people in a place regardless of whether it is bricks-and-mortar or online, the platform starts to get a value. The same explanation applies to city planning. A big city with skyscrapers along with easy access to local amenities like clinics and shopping centres seems to promise a better life to people. In this regard, it sounds reasonable to argue we need more space and it can be achieved mainly through replacing parks and gardens with apartments.
However, that argument actually has grossed over very important elements to consider for both efficiency and our lives. Firstly, the growth pattern of the population does not actually show the ever-exponential trend. Instead, it quintessentially represents the well-known ‘s’-shaped line where explosive growth appears somewhere in the middle and soon reaches the plateau. What it suggests is that the belief in “the more people, the marrier” has been already debunked by both social scientists and economists; no longer viable nor efficient.
Secondly, it is worth remembering that we have never agreed to cede our quality of life to efficiency. If anything, efficiency is merely a part of measurement to see the quality of life. Although we often forget the crucial importance of the environment, taking it for granted and treating them as if it is replaceable, it is, in fact, imperative in that we can live without it. Some may not be able to recognize it during rush hours and work hours, but that is why parks and gardens get even more important because it is the last few things left though which we can appreciate nature in a city.
