Residential environment and related health problems in Srinagar city Jammu Kashmir

Abstract

Urbanization is one of the most powerful and visible anthropogenic forces on newlineearth (Dawson et. al., 2009). It refers to a process in which an increasing proportion of newlinepopulation lives in cities and its suburbs. UN defines urbanization as the course of shift in newlinepopulation from a rural to a more urban civilization. Numerically expressed, urbanization newlinedenotes the increases in the share of the population that resides in urban areas newlinepredominantly because of net rural to urban migration (UNFPA, 2007). Thus, it is newlineidentified as the influx of population from the rural to the urban areas. It is an essential newlinecorollary of industrialization that goes hand in hand with the role of human settlements as newlineengines of growth in the economy and as promoters of scientific, socio-cultural and newlinetechnological development. Historically, the process of urbanization intensified in the newlinewake of the Industrial Revolution in the Western World, which led to increased rural to newlineurban migration. In the non-Western World, however, urbanization is more a defining newlinefeature of the twentieth century (United Nations, 2006). As may be expected, the pattern newlineof urbanization is found to be unequal between developed and developing countries as newlinethe majority of the population in developed countries live in urban areas, while the bulk newlineof the population in developing countries that are concentrated in Asia and Africa live in newlinerural areas. An inter-regional comparison in Asia reveals that South Asia is more rural newlineand has significantly lower levels of per capita income than other regions. Not newlinesurprisingly therefore, the pace of urban change in the South Asian region has been newlinerelatively modest, yet urbanization presents enormous challenges due to the extreme newlinepoverty and the pressure on urban services that it has brought about (Cohen, 2004).... newline