Essay on American Cultures

The topic of population density is highly discussed all over the world, and the main point of all the discussions is to promote a culture of civility in spite of everything. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to talk about population density and cultural civility, and to describe the own experience of the life in a dense environment.

Firs of all, it is important to mention that the problem of a dense population has different aspects of its development from positions of poor and wealthy people. Such a division has a place because it is possible to talk about a culture of civility when only few are poor, while when the situation is quite different, and only few are rich and others are poor, it is almost impossible to promote a culture of civility due to its weak base and culturally dissimilar situation. In this case, we can connect the American experience of growing population with urbanization and state that it will lead to rather rapid growth of cities; urban sprawl, the formation of urban agglomeration, and concentration of population in large cities. As a result, according to Fee & Hartley (2011), the main problems of urbanization are: environmental problems (many cities provide up to 80% of all emissions into the atmosphere, they also ”˜thrown’ up to several billion tons of solid waste into the environment); spontaneity and lack of control of the process that leads to the emergence of the so-called false or ”˜slum’ urbanization. In addition, according to Bryan et al (2007), “falling urban densities suggest that, over the past seven decades, the productivity benefits of dense cities have been weakening. Decreasing costs of transportation and communication have allowed firms to move production workers out of high-rent areas, and have allowed residents to move away from downtowns. It is unclear what effect these changes in the urban landscape will have on knowledge accumulation and growth in the future.” Of course, the ultimate goal of economic growth in America is to improve people’s life and livelihood, but it is not as easy to do in a situation of population density as it seems for the first glance.

Thinking about the own experience, when I lived in a dense environment with others (a shared apartment), I can state that it was not a very easy situation for me because every person has the own character and views on the life, and it was not very pleasant to deal with other people and to find some compromises in many questions. Of course, we used some special rules emerged to deal with problems of crowding, but these rules were not always effective. It seems to me that it was a good experience, which showed me that it is always necessary try to understand the other person, but it is also necessary to remember that the readiness to protect the own comfort may help to avoid problems in future.

It is true that some people have the variations how to deal with problems of urban crowding and congestion, but the experience of wealthy people, as it was above said, has the other results than the experience of poor people. For example, wealthy people can go to their work or their home in more quite hours, when there would be not so many people all around, while poor people have no such a possibility due to very strict rules at their working place.

In conclusion, we have observed the topic of population density and dwelled on some of its points with more details. In addition, there were presented several examples of my life in a dense environment, and one variation how wealthy people can deal with problems of existing urban crowding and congestion.