Essay on Advantages and Disadvantages of the City are as follows:
Advantages or Merits of City:
(1) The city offers opportunities and facilities for making full use of one’s abilities and talents.
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(2) It can make life joyful and comfortable. Major Service agencies are centralised in the city to satisfy various interests of the people such as work, education, recreation and politics.
(3) It encourages new ideals and inventions.
(4) It quickens social movements and enlarges social contacts. Social mobility becomes easier.
(5) There is less social distance being kept among people of different castes, races and religions. Hence there is more tolerance towards others.
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(6) The city is dynamic.
This dynamism contributes to social changes.
(7) The city has liberated women from the exclusiveness of domesticity. It has made women to stand on an equal footing with men.
(8) The city provides various means of recreation. In a city there is scope for personal advancement. The multifarious associations of the city cater to the multiple needs, interests and tastes of the people.
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(9) That is why, as Quinn says, “the great civilisations of antiquity—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman,—were cradled in cities, that urban communities typically have led in the creation of art, the advancement of science, and the dissemination of learning”.
(10) The city functions as a laboratory for human genius.
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Disadvantages or Demerits of City:
The city has its dark or the ugly side too.
(1) The city makes life materialistic and mechanical. It takes away from man his human aspect.
(2) Secondary relations are dominant in the city. People are indifferent towards one another. Superficial forms of politeness and manners are commonly found.There is lack of intimacy and privacy in the city.
(3) The city has made the people to become individualistic, selfish, rationalistic and calculative. Relations are commercialised. All relations are means to means and to no final ends.
(4) The city has posed a challenge to family. The urban family is in doldrums. Individualism is ripening within it. Divorce, desertion and separation are increasing. Joint family has disappeared. The family is cut to size.
(5) Social control is complex and less effective in the city. Instances of social deviance are more in the city.
(6) The city has made the life to become uncertain, insecure, and competitive.
(7) The city is said to be the centre of economic insecurity, mental illness, gambling, prostitution, drunkenness, crime, juvenile delinquency, etc.
(8) Concentration of people in the city creates problems of housing, water and electricity facility, over crowdedness, insanitation, etc.
(9) The cities are condemned as ‘ abnormal seed-beds of sin, scepticism, greed, crime, misery, filth and congestion’. It is branded as the centre of corruption, vice and misery.