Midterm Study

Which one of the following provocative statements is not one made by Edward Glaeser in the introductory chapter of Triumph of the City?

"cities are attractive centers of economic opportunity. ... Unfortunately, cities also are rather miserable places to live due to the inevitable traffic, crime, pollution, and wasteful government spending on things that the free market is much better equipped to handle."

1. proliferation of the mass suburb of FHA-backed "minimum houses" 2. growth of "streetcar suburbs" connected by electrified street railways to CBDs featuring new "skyscraper" office buildings and department stores 3. Edge Cities and "big city suburbs" recognized as the primary centers of urban economic life in the United States 4. emergence of picturesque enclave suburbs such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey 5. "spillover" extension of commercial activity outside the CBD along early commercial strips such as Wilshire Blvd.

1. 1950 2. 1890 3. 1980 4. 1850 5. 1920

Match the following attempts to give post-1920s Los Angeles a new focal point for a vibrant downtown center, with its corresponding decade of construction. 1. Disney Concert Hall and (later) the Grand Ave. project 2. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Music Center 3. Staples Center and (later) L.A. Live 4. City Hall, Civic Center, and Union Station

1. 2000 2. 1960 3. 1990 4. 1930

Since the Depression era, the U.S. federal government has promoted widespread home ownership through a variety of programs designed to facilitate affordable, long-term home loans. Match each of the following programs with its specific function: 1. create a secondary mortgage market allowing lenders to manage risk and mobilize capital by selling the loans they originate, in order to be bundled as mortgage-backed securities 2. provide government insurance against bad loans to private lenders, as long as those loans conformed to the government's standards 3. government insurance of home loans made to military veterans 4. direct government loans to borrowers who were at risk of defaulting and losing their homes through foreclosure

1. FNMA (Fannie Mae) 2. FHA 3. VA 4. HOLC

Which one (or more) of the following are true statements about MSAs, as defined by the U.S. Census?

1. MSAs can include "rural" areas and populations. 2. MSAs often (but not always) include more than one county. 3. MSA stands for Metropolitan Statistical Area

Which one (or more) of the following statements about urbanization and social-economic development are true?

1. More-developed countries are usually more urbanized than less-developed countries. 2. Urbanization levels (i.e., percent living in cities) have increased during the last hundred years in more-developed countries. 3. Urbanization levels are increasing year to year in less-developed countries.

A developer would like to build a 500,000 square-foot office building in a district zoned for a maximum allowable FAR of 5. How big of a lot would the developer need to obtain for a building this size?

100,000 sf

According to our textbook (chapter 12), this model U.S. law replaced the "sweeping ideals of the City Beautiful movement" with "the more prosaic concerns of planning a city that was standard and efficient," part of a more general movement to create a "rational" planning process managed at the local, municipal level.

1926 Standard State Zoning Enabling Act

Baker and Jones acquire and subdivide rancho land Arcadia Hotel and the Balloon Route Douglas Aviation builds its factory next to Clover Field The pedestrian-only Third Street Mall is created SMRR wins control of Santa Monica City Council

1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th

According to the standard rank-size rule, if the largest city in a county has a population of 4 million, the second-largest city should have a population of ______ .

2 million

The world's first cities (and, thus, civilizations) first emerged approximately _______ years ago.

6000

According to Census Bureau definitions, the U.S. population today is approximately ____ percent "urban" (including both "urbanized areas" and "urban clusters"), as opposed to "rural".

80

The segregation measure used most often is called the "Index of Dissimilarity". By this measure, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the most segregated metropolitan area in the United States for African-Americans, with a dissimilarity score of 82 (out of 100). Besides being big, what does this number mean?

82% of Milwaukee's Black population would need to move to other neighborhoods in order to be geographically distributed similar to everyone else in the metro area

Santa Monica: Ocean Park

A distinctive historic neighborhood, originally developed by Abbott Kinney

Which one of the following is an example of "localization economy", which is a type of agglomeration economy?

A start-up software company in California's Silicon Valley being able to meet for lunch to discuss their business plans with a venture capitalist specializing in the IT sector who has offices just a few blocks away.

While urbanized societies are increasingly the norm, there are still many countries with less than half of their population residing in cities. In which of the following world regions are you most likely to find a mostly rural country?

Africa (south of the Sahara Desert)

Which of the following is a true statement about the global history of urbanization?

As late as the 1800s, the vast majority of people lived in rural areas. Today, however, about half of the world population lives in cities, and in many of the most developed regions, the number is closer to 80%.

The greatest, most influential of the classic Arab-Muslim centers was ______ , capital of the Abbasid caliphate.

Baghdad

Which of the following statements about the comprehensive planning of a typical U.S. city today is least true?

Because of its importance, the comprehensive master plan is thoroughly revised and updated each year.

Which of the following pairs of first-largest and second-largest metro areas, within their respective countries, comes closest to the predictions of the rank-size rule? (Note: populations in millions of each metro are shown in parentheses)

Belgium: Brussels (2.0) and Antwerp (1.0)

Benefiting from large domestic supplies of coal; from a global colonial empire that provided raw materials, capital, and potential markets; and from a liberal political environment that generally empowered the innovative investment of private wealth; which country pioneered the industrial revolution and became the world's first mostly urban society?

Britain (UK)

Which of the following types of urban morphology is most built around a single, dominant urban center (a CBD or "downtown")?

Burgess's Concentric Zone model

Which of the following U.S. cities grew rapidly during the nineteenth century primarily because of its connection to railroads, rather than to rivers?

Chicago

Which one of the following statements is true?

Cities have existed on Earth for thousands of years, but a mostly urbanized world—in which half (or more) of all people worldwide live in cities—is a recent development.

Santa Monica: Mid City

Dense mix of apartments and major employment centers tied primarily to the healthcare and entertainment/multimedia industries

The journalist Joel Garreau popularized "_______" as a label for the large complexes of new, commercial downtown-like development located on the suburban periphery, such as Tyson's Corner, Virginia.

Edge Cities

There are several ways in which European cities are distinctive from their counterparts in North America. Which one or more of the following generally characterize European cities, but not North American? Check all that apply.

European cities have a more compact urban form tied to their historic pedestrian-era origins European cities tend to have modest skylines with little or no modern high-rise construction, especially near the city center. European cities usually maintain mixed-use traditions in and around their historic core, with many people living and/or shopping near the center and less centrifugal suburbanization than is typical in North America.

Which of the following is associated with Santa Monica rather than Venice / Ocean Park?

Gold Coast

With its compact central plaza lined by guild and town halls; its organic (unplanned) maze of pedestrian-oriented streets; and its old city walls now surrounded by more recent, modern urbanization, Bruges, Belgium is a premier example of a:

Hanseatic free merchants town

Early urban planning often took the form of elaborate, visionary "Grand Manner" design. This typically requires a rather authoritarian, heavy-handed government to actually implement such designs. As our textbook authors describe, this practice of "clearing and redesigning existing cities--with little regard given to those who inhabited the soon-to-be demolished buildings" has increasingly come under criticism. What label, inspired by the experience of 19th-Century Paris, is often used to describe such large-scale "urban renewal" in a negative light?

Haussmannization

While only considered a "secondary" world city of the global "semiperiphery" by Friedmann in 1986, this city's world-city credentials seem much more impressive today. For example, it is one of the world's leading locations for corporate headquarters; air passenger travel; international offices of U.S.-based law firms; and interoffice linkages with other major world cities. (See the various tables in chapter 4 of the textbook.) Which city am I describing, whose rising status can be seen as a product of its country's growing economic clout around the world?

Hong Kong, China

This law was intended to mobilize federal-government resources in a nationwide effort to combat poverty—to clear slums and renew urban neighborhoods. Instead, many critics now see the law as having had more of a gentrifying effect, displacing the urban poor while cosmetically fixing blight on behalf of powerful downtown business interests.

Housing Act of 1949

Using some popular terminology, it can be said that NIMBYs often provide powerful political opposition against LULUs. To which of the following does this refer?

Housing owners seeking to protect the exchange values of their properties against the negative externalities associated with certain local land uses.

Which geographic hearth of ancient civilization is most closely associated with "planned" cities, as opposed to relatively unplanned "organic" cities?

Indus River

Which one (or more) of the following statements is/are true about Bunker Hill in Los Angeles?

It was once one of the city's premier residential district, full of Victorian-era mansions. Now home to many of the city's tallest skyscrapers, it stands adjacent to the "elite acropolis" that several generations of leaders have hoped to build as the city's cultural and governmental civic center. Thousands of residents were dislocated from the area in the 1950s and '60s to make room for one of the city's premier urban renewal projects.

Which of the following pairs of countries is most associated with the second or "new" wave of immigration to the United States in the late 1800s, characterized by segregation in dense neighborhoods of tenements?

Italy and Russia

The 16th-Century "Laws of the Indies" continue to give the cities of this highly urbanized region a distinctive urban form that features a rectangular grid of streets around a central town square or plaza.

Latin America

What world city has been described by many observers as the "shock city" epitomizing postmodern urban change in the late 20th Century?

Los Angeles, USA

Observations of the social-economic conditions in which city during the industrial revolution led Marx and Engels to develop their theoretical explanation of modern development, which inspired a series of communist revolutions throughout the world?

Manchester, UK

Santa Monica: Sunset Park

Mid-20th-century working-class area that developed around the airport and; like the city as a whole, it has recently gentrified into a residential area of considerable affluence

Thanks to its position on the Mississippi River, this city quickly rose to being one of the USA's largest in the early 1800s, even though most of the country's urban growth took place in other regions

New Orleans

This city cemented its place atop the North American urban hierarchy by building the Erie Canal in the early 1800s.

New York

The roster of the most globally important "world cities" is always changing, and it also depends on the particular ranking system being used (e.g., number of corporate headquarters, volume of trade through local ports, assets controlled by local banks). With the relative decline of Japan, and thus Tokyo, during the last two decades, these two cities appear to be the two most globally significant world cities in the early 21st century--at least for now.

New York and London

By present-day United Nations definitions, the first two modern megacities were:

New York and Tokyo

Which geographical region in the United States was the first to urbanize and industrialize as the "American Manufacturing Belt", attracting most of the country's Nineteenth-Century immigrants in the process?

Northeast

Which of the following statements best describes Southern California's situation at the beginning of the 20th century?

One of the oldest urban centers in California, Los Angeles saw its relative position within the state decline with the San Francisco-centered Gold Rush. During the last three decades of the 1800s, though, Los Angeles grew rapidly to close the gap.

Santa Monica: Downtown

Original center of the city and principle zone of tourism today

The meteoric rise of several major East Asian cities after World War II, as the centers of prosperous "Tiger" economies, "broke the mold" of impoverished post-colonial urbanism throughout the non-Western world. Which one of the following cities is not one of the four primary icons of this remarkable rise?

Pyongyang

After a long downturn in immigration to the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, immigration has resurged since 1965. This newest wave of immigration has some common characteristics with the immigrations of the 1800s, but it also is distinctive from its predecessors in many ways. Which one or more of the following are true of the post-1965 wave?

Recent immigrants have moved in large numbers to Los Angeles and many other Sunbelt cities, not just the old immigration centers of the Northeast. Latin America and southern and eastern Asia have been the main source regions for U.S. immigration during the past 50 years.

According to our textbook's discussion of racial segregation in U.S. cities, which of the following statements is not true?

Segregation of Hispanic populations in U.S. cities has declined dramatically during the last 30 years--so much so that by 2030, the Census Bureau expects Hispanics to be fully geographically integrated in most cities, with segregation index scores near zero.

At the end of the 19th Century, the most urbanized region of the United States was the "American Manufacturing Belt". The most rural region was the:

Southeast

Unlike most coastal American cities, Los Angeles's downtown is located inland because:

Spanish colonial leaders wanted a site with year-round access to fresh surface water

Several modernist public-housing projects from the mid-20th Century did not fare well, due to a variety of factors, including flawed architectural design. The highest-profile of such failures, Pruitt-Igoe, was located in which U.S. city?

St. Louis

The French geographer, Jean Gottmann, identified the first modern "megalopolis" as:

The BosWash conurbation along the northeast coast of the USA

Santa Monica: North of Montana

The city's most affluent zone of single-family housing

Which of the following is not a key guiding principle incorporated into Central Place Theory?

The larger the size of a central place, the greater in number of such places, with smaller central places being smaller in number.

Generically defining the idea of an "urban" place can be tricky, but perhaps we can most straightforwardly say cities are agglomerations of people. What does this mean?

Urban places are home to large numbers of people living and working in relatively close proximity to each other.

The star-shaped, fortified "new town" of Palmanova, Italy, is one of the best examples of what kind of urban place?

a bastide

Which of the following ideas would you least associate with the Chicago School of urban sociology?

a belief that social-geographic patterns are best understood as the product of random historical contingency

As embodied by the designs of his chief architect, Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler hoped to reshape Berlin around an alternative vision of modern, industrial urbanism. Which of the following best describes Hitler's vision?

a ceremonial urban center echoing the imperial forum of ancient Rome, with neoclassical domed- and columned architecture of enormous dimensions representing a restored European empire

Which of the following is least associated with "postmodern" urbanism?

a renaissance of civic culture that encourages "redistributional" government policy, which is more concerned with providing public housing and services to underprivileged, low-income groups than with selling the city to shoppers, tourists, and businesses

Which one or more of the following are characteristic of cities in North Africa? Check all that apply.

a spatially separate "new town" featuring wide, straight boulevards and European-style buildings of the 19th or 20th Century a surviving, historic old town featuring a dense maze of narrow streets, courtyard homes, mosques, and souks/bazaars a skyline punctuated by mosques with their minaret towers, perhaps joined by modern high rises on the city's periphery

Several new development projects in downtown Los Angeles, such as Metro 417 (i.e., the old Subway Terminal Building) and the Downtown Standard Hotel, feature an approach facilitated by a 1999 city law known as:

adaptive reuse

Which of the following are you more likely to find within the downtown "frame" rather than the CBD?

an abandoned warehouse, currently used as low-rent work space by artists and targeted as a potential site for subsidized redevelopment

Prior to Alexander the Great and the "Hellenistic" era, cities in ancient Greece (the classical Hellenic polis) were characterized by:

an aggressively urban consciousness built around new democratic notions of citizenship and embodied in the space of the agora

Southern California's historic "Bruce's Beach" illustrates:

an example of racial segregation in metro L.A. that hasn't been officially remembered in a significant way, at least until a few years ago

The South Asian maidan is:

an open space that surrounded and protected the old colonial fort and port

Urbanized societies, those with, say, at least 65% of their population living in cities,

are much more common today than they were a century ago, but there are still large numbers of countries, particularly in Africa and southern Asia, that remain mostly rural.

The geographer Jay Vance argued that cities:

change significantly over time, but this change tends to be slow and partial so that today's urban places reflect numerous legacies of the past alongside new developments of the present

Ancient cities around the world typically had a prominent "little city" within a city--a central compound of temples and/or administrative buildings often placed atop a hill and perhaps fortified with protective (but also symbolic) walls. This historic central space of monumental power is known as the:

citadel

Advocates of "new urbanism" would be most likely to favor which of the following policies?

cluster and mixed-used zoning

Wittfogel's "Hydraulic Civilization" theory emphasized the importance of ____ in the origin of the world's first cities.

construction and administration of infrastructure (especially irrigation)

New York's landmark Zoning Resolution of 1916 introduced comprehensive land-use planning to the United States, and it also _______ .

created variable height limits based on street width and setback distances

Which of the following hypothesized explanations of concentrated poverty in urban slums is criticized for its apparent blame-the-victim philosophy?

culture of poverty

Compared to other metropolitan areas in North America, the Los Angeles region is:

densely populated (one of the highest metro population densities in North America)

While experiencing a great deal of change since the fall of the Soviet Union, cities throughout Eastern Europe still tend to be shaped by the conditions that held during the Communist 20th Century. Which one of the following is not a characteristic usually associated with communist urbanism in Eastern Europe?

dominant CBD anchored by prestigious shopping malls and department stores

Manhattan's narrow lots helped spawn one of the world's largest, and most notorious, collections of tenements in the late 1800s. These tenements took a variety of forms, but those built after 1867 were required by the city to include a narrow interior air shaft between adjacent buildings. Thanks to their unique spatial footprint, these buildings came to be called "________" tenements.

dumbbell

Which of the following would you least associate with the "new downtowns" of U.S. cities today?

emphasis on specialized office buildings that are usually occupied only during standard daytime work hours—8 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday.

Based on his account of Detroit in chapter 2 of Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser would be most likely to support which one of the following policies to revive the fortunes of a city in long-term economic decline?

encourage small-scale entrepreneurship through a combination of subsidies, relaxed regulations, and a public investment in education and other core services

Mount Laurel, New Jersey, became famous within the planning profession during the 1980s when it became the center over the legal struggle involving which of the following concepts in planning. (Hint: this concept is an attempt to remedy the primary outcome of "exclusionary zoning".)

fair share housing

The term used by early sociologists to describe the impersonal interactions of people in modern urban society, which are seen as inconsistent with traditional notions of village community, is:

gesellschaft

Which of the following would you least associate with the "smart growth" planning philosophy of SMRR?

high-rise office buildings surrounding by expansive parking lots, distributed throughout all areas of the city

As measured by Larry Ford's Skyline Score, the cities with the most densely developed skylines relative to their population generally include all of the following, except:

historic European cities (e.g., Berlin)

Which of the following was least characteristic of Soviet urbanism?

historic preservation of old city names, churches, and Tsarist monuments

The historian Dolores Hayden has recently described the history of the American suburb as one crafted around a "triple dream". The three legs of that dream are:

house, yard, and community

"H________" refers to situations where a particular social group is segregated from other groups in their city as measured in several different ways, including evenness, isolation, centralization, clustering, and/or concentration.

hypersegregation

As reflected in classical Zhou Li design, Chinese urbanism historically has emphasized:

imperial administration by priests and bureaucrats

After Rome became an empire, its great public space known as the _____ became more and more a citadel-like monumental center of spectacle.

imperial forum

Most large American cities have a distinctive "skid row" area of homelessness and intense poverty, which usually is located:

in the downtown "zone of discard"

Citing the example of Detroit, as well as several others, Edward Glaeser declares, "The age of the _____ city is over ... and it will never return."

industrial

Friedrich Engels' and Jacob Riis's descriptions of nineteenth-century Manchester and New York revealed a cities characterized by:

intense poverty and squalor

According to Glaeser, what do they make in Bangalore?

internationally exchangeable ideas

A rental-car company specializing in hybrid cars struggling to find qualified mechanics because of none of the local schools specializes in "green" technologies.

localization diseconomy

A start-up software company in California's Silicon Valley being able to meet for lunch to discuss their business plans with a venture capitalist specializing in the IT sector who has offices just a few blocks away.

localization economy

Cities that are home to more than 10 million people are known as:

megacity

In Vance's Mercantile Model of historical urban development, the largest cities are the ones that:

most effectively and prolifically link to networks of long-distance trade

There are many general differences between cities of the modern, industrial age and their pre-modern predecessors. Which of the following is not an innovation of the modern era, but instead something that characterized a number of ancient cities, too?

planned urban design around a rectangular, gridiron form

Despite the rise of the "Sunbelt", the old American Manufacturing Belt continues to be home to a disproportionate number of large U.S. cities. Which of the following terms describes a reason why so many people continued to live in the Northeast during the last few decades of the 20th century?

principle of initial advantage

California's (in)famous Proposition 13 focused on this source of funding, which historically is the main source of revenue for local governments.

property taxes

Which one (or more) of the following were characteristic of the original mass suburbs of the 1940s and '50s?

reliance on the automobile dependence upon federally supported mortgage loans inexpensively built, mass-produced homes using standardized light-frame construction

A large share of the urban populations of less-developed regions reside in _________ , such as in the favelas of Brazil, the bidonvilles of Cote d'Ivoire, and kampungs of Indonesia. While often squalid, and sometimes illegal, many now view such settlements more optimistically as a form of "autodevelopment".

self-help (self-built) housing

As formally defined in urban economic theory, a city's economic base consists of basic activities, which are defined by:

selling to non-locals from outside the city

In chapter 2, our textbook identifies three primary elements of the industrial city. They are (pick three of the following):

slums factories railroads

The sociologist Louis Wirth argued that the social environment facing the individual in the modern city involves:

social interaction with many people, but these tended to be limited relationships with strangers and mere acquaintances

Urban morphology is the study of cities' _______ .

social-geographic shape

As described in chapter one of the Kaplan textbook, urban geography is a "synthetic" academic discipline, weaving together themes and concepts one might encounter in work on urban sociology, economics, political science, psychology, and more. In addition to this synthesis, urban geography is also interested in spatial interaction —that is, in studying the intensity of linkages and volume of flows between locations at both intermetropolitan and intrametropolitan scales.

spatial interaction

What did Homer Hoyt observe to lead him to modify Burgess's concentric-zone model by adding radial "sectors"?

spatial patters of housing values that tended to follow major commercial and industrial corridors into and out of the city center

Despite efforts to shield urban planning from political pressure and make it more of a "technocratic" profession guided by the likes of a hired (i.e., not elected) city manager, planning is nonetheless very political. This is reflected in planners' need to identify and respond to the many different _______ whose interests are involved.

stakeholders

While a number of social, political, and economic factors help explain the rise of the skyscraper in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, what two key technological developments made the skyscraper possible and practical?

steel-frame construction and elevators

Which of the following terms describes the discrimination that still exists in many housing markets through the informal selection of information about various neighborhoods and available properties given by real-estate agents to home seekers, based largely on the home seekers' race? (E.g., White home buyers are shown properties in some neighborhoods, while Black home buyers of the same economic standing are directed somewhere else.)

steering

As summarized by Stanback and others, economic growth around new information- and logistics-instensive companies specializing in the high-end service sector or flexible new methods of just-in-time manufacturing, has been concentrated in recent decades in which part of the United States?

suburban areas of the southwestern Sunbelt (e.g., Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, Arizona)

Which of the following terms related to ancient cities can be defined as the "stimulus of urban agglomeration," the innovating energy that results simply from having a lot of people living and working together in the same place?

synekism

One of the primary symbols of the industrial city, ________ are dense multi-story apartment buildings that, in New York City during the late 1800s, took on a distinctive "dumbbell" form.

tenements

The "Rust Belt" is a region in the United States that experienced rapid economic decline in the 1980s due to:

tertiarization

Which of the following geographic areas best exemplifies the idea of a "megalopolis"?

the "SanSan" region of coastal Southern California, stretching from Santa Barbara through Los Angeles to San Diego, as well as inland to communities such as Santa Clarita, San Bernardino, and Escondido

One justification for the use of zoning, is the "property owner's dilemma". This refers to:

the disincentive for individual property owners to invest additional money in the renovation of their property since its value as a sellable commodity is tied largely to the condition of neighboring properties and the overall desirability of the neighborhood

As the forces of "agglomeration" became stronger than the forces of "centrality", the impact on urban morphology was:

the emergence of multiple new business centers throughout the city (i.e., downtown as well as the suburbs), so that business still clustered together locally but not in a singular way for the city as a whole

According to Burgess's Chicago School concentric-rings model of urban morphology:

the per-acre intensity of land use tends to decline as you move away from the CBD, consistent with a similarly declining bid-rent curve

Baker and Jones, and their successors with the Southern Pacific railroad, originally envisioned Santa Monica in the 1870s and '80s to be:

the primary ocean port serving Los Angeles

The U.S. Census Bureau's minimum population for an "urban" place is 2500. This threshold value is:

there is no international standard set by the UN; each country has its own definition of what identifies a place as urban

As officially defined by the United Nations, and widely copied by countries around the world, an "urban" place is home to at least _____ residents.

there is no single, official statistical definition of urban that serves as a global standard

The Swiss-French architect known as Le Corbusier is most associated with which of the following types of design?

tower-in-a-park international modernism

A pizza restaurant unable to offer free-delivery service because traffic is so bad in its neighborhood that it is impossible to deliver fresh, warm pies beyond a radius of only about one mile from the store.

urbanization diseconomy

A prestigious law firm able to woo new clients by providing them with free tickets to their luxury box at the local NFL stadium.

urbanization economy

Of the following, which group would you most expect to struggle with "spatial entrapment"?

women with children