February 10, 2012
Copyright @ 2012, Ram Bansal, All Rights Reserved
I usually live in a house with an open atmosphere of a village with a lot of plantations all around, and go sometimes to visit my children living in an apartment in an urban locality. This provides me a first-hand experience of living in two types of shelters, often used as abodes by human-beings.
Comparative Building Characteristics
A house is often single-storied but may have some constructions upstairs as well as under-ground too. Owner of a house owns the land on which it is built and holds full rights on the roof also, making him/her the sole owner of the property.
About 4 decades back, there were hardly any multi-storied buildings for residences, but with the rising population and development in technologies of building construction, multi-storied towers have become common features of urbanization all over the globe. Each residential accommodation unit in a multi-storied building is called a flat apartment, or simply a flat or an apartment, for its flatness of floor and roofing. This saves on cost of land and that of construction of the building for accommodating on per family unit basis. As far as ownership is concerned, the owners of these apartments live in the air owning neither the floor nor the roof of their respective apartments.
Atmospheric Conditions
A house often has rooms with walls on all sides and the roofing, verandah with no wall on one or more sides with roof supported by pillars instead of walls, and a courtyard with low-height walls but no roofing. These three components of the house provide opportunities of enjoying a wide range of conditions like privacy and warmth of a room, cool breeze in a varandah and open sky and sunlight in the courtyard. These, in turn, provide better health to the person tolerant to varied climatic conditions.
An apartment may have a small open or semi-open space in the form of a balcony, with all other spaces walled and roofed. This makes the whole apartment having the same living condition of temperature and ventilation. This affects the health of the residents making it intolerant to varied climatic conditions, hence, less adaptable. Thus, economy of an apartment takes its toll in terms of bad health of the residents. Artificial illumination, ventilation, heating and cooling arrangements for an apartment become necessary making the life of residents more artificial than that of residents of a house.
Convenience of Living
Life in an apartment of a high rise building becomes intolerable if electricity supply fails for some reason. This makes stand-by diesel generators essential for keeping the artificial life on the go. Comparatively, life in a house for its varied atmospheric conditions at different places is more natural and standby electricity generators may not be essential for a few hours of electricity failure.
Every time, an apartment resident needing to go out has to climb down to ground level and later climb-up to his/her abode in the air. This makes a power-driven lift necessary for a multi-storied residential building. Psychologically, inconvenience of climbing up and down develops inertia in the residents against going out or coming in. This results into loss of some work of the residents apart from bad effects on their health.
Life in a house is free from hassles and inconveniences of that in an apartment. But, apartment life is more secured than that in a house with respect to burglaries and such other crimes.
Hygiene and Cleanliness
For the absence or low level of natural light and ventilation in an apartment, population and varieties of bacteria find it more congenial to grow, leading to more health problems for the residents. Conversely, house residents enjoy better health on this count too.
But all is not bad for an apartment life. Problem of dust and dirt arrival from outside is more in a house than that in an apartment, making the apartment life cleaner than that in a house. Insects, flies, rodents, stray dogs, etc find it easier to enter a house than an apartment, again ranking the apartment a cleaner place than a house.
Urban versus Rural Lives
Problem of ground area per unit of population is high in urban areas than that in the villages. While, cities are getting fasted converted to high-rise concrete structures, rural areas still have houses to accommodate the villagers. For the reasons given above, rural people are generally healthier than the urban population in early stages of life. As age advances, a person needs more medical care and attention than earlier which are scarce in rural areas with their abundance in cities, making the rural veterans to have more health problem than those of the cities.
The situation is stabilizing fast with healthier children and youths in villages living with sick parents. The situation is just opposite in cities where comparatively healthier veterans are found in company of generally weak children and youths. Whole of this study derives us to the ultimate point of humanity repenting sooner or later for its mass-scale urbanization of the earth.
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