Jo is 15 and lives in Parkville. When Jo’s grandparents first came to Parkville 50 years ago, it was a quiet country village in the center of the country. At that time, they had a small house on the edge of town, with some fields and the hills in the distance.

But Parkville was close to a big city, Arnwick, with about 200,000 people. People from the countryside began to arrive in Arnwick to find jobs to have a better life. However ,it was expensive to live in the centre of Arnwick, so the city government decided to build flats around the edges of the city. And soon, Parkville became a suburb of Arnwick. It now has over a million people .Jo’s family live in one of those new flats—there’s no room for small houses any more.

The small local school in Parkville closed down five years ago. Jo goes to a school close to the centre of Arnwick, with 2,000 pupils. No one knows all their names.

It takes Jo an hour to get to school, and this adds to the traffic and pollution. But it’s not her fault. She liked her old school.

Arnwick needs larger hospitals and more doctors, better public transport and fewer private cars. There need to be more shops and offices. It also needs clean water and no rubbish in the streets. It’s difficult to run a big city, and to protect people from crime. So it also needs more laws and more police, and more taxes to pay for everything.