Lighting Up

Many kinds of lights just like the stars shining around the whole city when I looked from the airplane at night. I still remember when I took the flight back to China, I saw tons of light from the airplane before landing. Later on, I realized that nowadays cities have become more and more crowded as the human population has been rising at the same time. In order to develop the cities, the city government has to make some suburbs become part of the city. Since this policy was implemented, it has had a huge effect on the lives of people, including me.

Traffic problems can be solved when we live with the expanding area of a city. In many cities, people cannot imagine how many traffic problems and accidents occur during rush hour every day. When I rode my bike to school during my high school years in China, I could not go through many streets. People would get anxious because they suffered from the traffic jams every day. I was always stuck in traffic jams on my way to school for at least half an hour every day. However, when some suburbs became parts of our city, many streets could be used; my life had become more relaxed every day. After these changes, I had never thought about how long I would spend on the way to school; I had never worried about how long I would be late to school. I could do everything in order and had a delicious breakfast in the morning. It made me feel the sunshine became brighter in the morning and sunset could be so beautiful at nightfall.

Since some suburbs have become parts of the city, there are more and more job opportunities available to people because the traffic problems have been resolved. Along with the financial crisis, a huge amount of people lost their jobs unpredictably. People would live a difficult life without any income after they lost the jobs. After the suburbs become part of our city, a lot of enterprises focused on these extra areas. They set up their business and built many commercial companies in the original suburbs. Therefore, they had to hire many employees to work for them. One of my uncles had been laid off under the economic recession, and he found a job as a salesman in a new shopping center in the original suburb. He always deeply appreciated this new government policy. Different parts of the new areas still need many people to manage, such as in security and street cleaning. In addition, the projects set up by mercantile agencies will act as a stimulant to further economic growth.

After the traffic problems and occupation had been solved, it showed us an obvious advantage of the city which is that we get more and more space to live. Since our city had grown enormously, we don’t need to live too closely anymore.  Now, there is more space for homebuilders to build houses and people can live further apart and can still be near the city. My family did not like living with noise, so we bought a townhouse when some new houses had been built. After we moved into the townhouse, we felt more comfortable. I could enjoy my own spacious room and did my private things. Actually, some original suburbs that already became parts of city started to promote another kind of small city in the new area.  

     Looking from the sky, we can’t count how many lights light up at night. This only appeared after some parts become part of the city. These expanding areas brought more benefits to our life. Most Chinese people have more convenience since moving to these “new” cities. However, each coin has two sides; we still have to prevent the new city from some bad trends such as increasing pollution. We should always think about how can we make full use of the city that exists in our life? It depends on how we treat the "extra size" of the city.  It is my wish that our city will be illuminated by more and more lights if we treat the additional areas in the right way.