The reading was very interesting as it brought to light many things that I have wondered about or never known regarding the development of cities. While reading, I came across a number of issues that I was interested about. One of these was was development of infrastructure to provide the necessary service to urban dwellers. Services like water, electricity, gas, transportation are necessary, yet expensive and difficult to organize for large cities. As a result, wealthy entrepreneurs offered to fund such projects in return for under the table benefits from the government. Today, we can still observe how the problems with having adequate infrastructures are still affecting large cities.

For some time, I worked part time in an office located in Brooklyn Heights. The neighborhood features rows of low rise brown stone buildings. The neighborhood is one of the oldest in Brooklyn with history dating back well over 150 years. This means that many of the existing infrastructures, such as water, electricity, gas, and transportation, are old and can only support the small population of people in the existing neighborhood. However, with all the housing development in NYC, Brooklyn Heights is about to be changed. New multi-story condo buildings are being developed and will replace a number of buildings in Brooklyn heights. These condos will increase the population of the neighborhood by at least a few thousands. This raises a problem with how can the city provide the necessary services to this neighborhood once these new condos are built.

As I’ve mentioned before, the existing infrastructure is not designed for the large amount of people that will live in the neighborhood after the condos are built. Utility services will need to be improved drastically to match the growing density. Transportation is another problem. The streets in this neighborhood are extremely narrow. Parking is already scarce and will be made even more so after the condos are built. Subway lines in and around this neighborhood are already running very close to full capacity. The increase in residents would place additional strain on this already insufficient service.

This is just an example of how infrastructures are struggling to keep up with the constantly changing city. This problem extends beyond Brooklyn Heights and affects other neighborhoods and cities as well.