chapter 6-human geo
Models and Theories to explain the distribution and interaction of these urban systems (4)
1. Central Place Theory 2. Gravity Model 3. Rank-Size Rule 4. Primate Cities
Criticisms of Sustainable City Design Initiatives
1. High housing costs still price out lower-income residents or favour middle to upper-income residents 2. De facto segregation or decreased diversity are perpetuated 3. Increased popularity may place stress on infrastructure or community; draw away residents or revenue from surrounding areas 4. Potential residents still favour yard space and detached single-family homes, quiet and private (e.g., as found in suburbs) 5. New mixed-use developments in suburbs can still perpetuate sprawl in surrounding areas (e.g., greenfields) 6. Many residents will not relinquish their cars, requiring parking spaces 7. Cost of new mixed-use or converted buildings can be very expensive 8. Similar designs may produce placelessness or loss of historical character
Greenbelts
A ring of land maintained as parks, agriculture, or other types of open space to limit the sprawl of an urban area.
Ghettos
Areas of poverty occupied by a specific ethnic group.
Edge Cities
As suburbs grew, some of the functions of the CBD began to appear in them. At key locations along transportation routes, mini-downtowns of hotels, malls, restaurants, and office complexes emerged. These are known as edge cities.
Market Area of a service
Central place is a market center for the exchange of good and services by people attracted from the surrounding area. centrally located to maximize accessibility Businesses in central places compete against each other to serve as markets for goods and services for the surrounding region. The area surrounding a service from which customers are attracted is the market area, or hinterland. A market area is a good example of a nodal region—a region with a core where the characteristic is most intense.
Describe the effectiveness of different attempts to address urban sustainability challenges.
Challenges to urban sustainability include suburban sprawl, sanitation, climate change, air and water quality, the large ecological footprint of cities, and energy use. Responses to urban sustainability challenges can include regional planning efforts, remediation and redevelopment of brownfields, establishment of urban growth boundaries, and farmland protection policies.
Central Business District
Downtown is the best-known and the most visually distinctive area of most cities. Downtown is known to geographers by the more precise term central business district (CBD). The CBD is compact—less than 1 percent of the urban land area—but contains a large percentage of the public, business, and consumer services.
Business services in Europe
Europe's CBDs contain professional and financial services. However, business services in Europe's CBDs are less likely to be housed in skyscrapers than those in North America. Some European cities try to preserve their historic CBDs by limiting high rise buildings.
CBDs in Europe
Europe's CBDs have a different mix of land uses than those in North America. Differences stem from the medieval origins of many of Europe's CBDs. European cities display a legacy of low-rise structures and narrow streets, built as long ago as medieval times.
What are the solutions to issues about long-term viability of cities?
Greenbelts, Smart Growth, New Urbanism
Modern effects of Historical Realestate practices
Increased segregation Decreased access to resources Affordability of housing Discrimination and housing laws established
Explain the processes that initiate and drive urbanization and suburbanization - 6.2
Megacities and megacities are distinct spatial outcomes of urbanization increasingly located in countries of the periphery and semi-periphery. Processes of suburbanization, sprawl, and decentralization have created new land-use forms—including edge cities, exurbs, and boomburbs—and new challenges.
Boomburbs
Over half of Americans live in suburbs. In the developed world, especially in North America, it has been the most prominent change in urban areas since the middle of the 20th century. Because of their rapid growth, they are now being referred to as boomburbs.
Internal Structure of Cities
People are not distributed randomly within an urban area. They concentrate in particular neighborhoods, depending on their social characteristics. Geographers describe where people with particular characteristics are likely to live within an urban area, and they offer explanations for why these patterns occur. The various zones fit together like a puzzle to create the entirety of the city.
Identify the different urban concepts such as hierarchy, interdependence, relative size, and spacing that are useful for explaining the distribution, size, and interaction of cities
Principles that are useful for explaining the distribution and size of cities include rank-size rule, the primate city, gravity, and Christaller's central place theory.
Central Place Theory
Proposed by German geographer, Walter Christaller in 1933, Central Place Theory was developed to explain the distribution of cities of different sizes across a region. This concept can also be applied to explain how the most profitable location for a service can be identified. Christaller defined a central place as a location where people go to receive goods and services.
Causes and locations of squatter settlements
Rapid urbanization Demand for affordable housing Failure to enforce land-use policies Edge of the city Vacant/undesirable land Land with unclear title
Responses to urban sustainability challenges
Regional planning efforts Remediation and redevelopment of brownfields Establishment of urban growth boundaries Farmland protection policies Suburban Sprawl Pollution and Air Quality Clean water and sanitation
Situation of settlements
Relative location of a city, city's place in the regions and the world around it
Explain the processes that initiate and drive urbanization and suburbanization
Site and situation influence the origin, function, and growth of cities. Changes in transportation and communication, population growth, migration, economic development and government policies influence urbanization.
Central City
urban settlement that has been legally incorporated into an independent, self-governing unit known as a municipality
Explain how low, medium, and high-density housing characteristics represent different patterns of residential land use
Residential buildings and patterns of land use reflect and shape the city's culture, technological capabilities, cycles of development, and infilling.
Blockbusting
the practice of persuading owners to sell property cheaply because of the fear of people of another race or class moving into the neighbourhood, and thus profiting by reselling at a higher price.
Gentrification
the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process.
Harris Galactic City (or peripheral)/ Edge City Model
- Beginning in the 1950's, suburban growth skyrocketed as governments built highways that improved transportation in and out of cities, and subsidized the purchase of homes. - These developments and a close study of Detroit led Chauncy Harris to create a galactic city model, describing the spread of US cities outward from the CBD to the suburbs, leaving a declining inner city. - As suburbs grew, some of the functions of the CBD began to appear in these edge cities, including hotels, malls, restaurants, and office complexes. - Edge cities are nodes of economic activities that have developed in the periphery of large cities. - They usually have tall office buildings, a concentration of retail shops, relatively few residences, and are located at the junction of transportation routes.
Multiple Nuclei Model
- Geographers Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman developed the multiple-nuclei model by studying changes in cities (Chicago) in the 1940's. - This model suggests that functional zonation occurred around multiple centers, or nodes. - The characteristics of each node either attracted or repelled certain types of activities. - The result was a city that consisted of a patchwork of land uses, each with its own center, or nucleus. - In the multiple-nuclei model, the CBD and related functions continued to exist but were joined by smaller business districts that emerged in the suburbs. - A zone of industry could be in a variety of locations, including the traditional CBD or port, or it could move to new outlying locations near an airport or other transportation junction. - The industrial zone would attract related industries and an area of higher density housing. - A university or business park might function as a mini-CBD and attract nearby theatres, restaurants, and other amenities. High-quality homes would be nearby, as well as student housing
Hoyt Sector Model
- In the 1930's, economist Homer Hoyt developed a different way of looking at cities (Chicago)-the sector model. - While Burgess saw rings of land use growing outward from the CBD, Hoyt described how different types of land use and housing were all located near the CBD early in a city's history. - Each grew outward as the city expanded, creating new wedges, or sectors of land use, rather than rings. - The model describes sectors of land use for low-, medium-, and high- income housing. - The model also notes a sector for transportation (rail, canal, and other networks) extending from the edge to the center of the city. - The transportation sector favors an adjacent zone of manufacturing. - The model places low-income housing next to industrial and transportation zones, and high-income in wedge away from those zones.
2 changes affecting the density gradient recently
1. Fewer people living in the center. The density gradient thus has a gap in the center, where few live. 2. Fewer differences in density within urban areas. The number of people living on a hectare of land has decreased in the central residential areas through population decline and abandonment of old housing. At the same time, density has increased on the periphery through construction of apartment and town-house projects and diffusion of suburbs across a larger area. *These two changes flatten the density gradient and reduce the extremes of density between inner and outer areas traditionally found within cities.
Goals of New Urbanism
1. Reduce the amount or area of suburban or urban sprawl 2. Increase walkability or pedestrian-friendly areas 3. Increase bikeable areas 4. Increase transit-oriented development, more energy efficient transport, or more public transportation 5. expand the variety of housing types in the same are 6. increased diversity; ages, income levels, cultures, ethnicities 7. construct green buildings or energy efficient structures 8. enable healtheir lifestyles (outdoor activites/ access to food) 9. produce archiecture and design to relflect local history or culture 10. construct denser or more compact built space; support denser population 11. develop more open public space 12. increase amount of outdoor dining, performance, market, festival space 13. decrease commuting time or live close to work 14. promote sustainability: minimal environmental impact, eco-friendly tech, less use of fuels
According to gravity model, what two patterns does consumer behavior reflect?
1. The greater the number of people living in a particular place, the greater the number of potential customers for a service. An area that contains 100 families will generate more customers than a house containing only 1 family. 2. The farther people are from a particular service, the less likely they are to use it. People who live 1 kilometer from a store are more likely to patronize it than people who live 10 kilometers away. The threshold must also be adjusted because the further customers are from the service, the less likely they are to patronize it.
Explain causes and effects of geographic change within urban areas.
As urban populations move within a city, economic and social challenges result, including: issues related to housing and housing discrimination such as redlining, blockbusting, and affordability; access to services; rising crime; environmental injustice; and the growth of disamenity zones or zones of abandonment. Squatter settlements and conflicts over land tenure within large cities have increased. Responses to economic and social challenges in urban areas can include inclusionary zoning and local food movements. Urban renewal and gentrification have both positive and negative consequences. Functional and geographic fragmentation of governments—the way government agencies and institutions are dispersed between state, county, city, and neighborhood levels—presents challenges in addressing urban issues.
How world cities function at the top of the world's hierarchy
Cities have been for thousands of years the centers of civilization as they have watched empires, kingdoms, governments, and corporations come and go. But in the space of just a few decades, our urban fabric is undergoing a radical transformation; today's wave of mass urbanization is historically unprecedented in speed and scale.
Trasnportation and Communication leading to increased urbanization
Cities have grown in number and size as improvements in transportation have grown. Trains, buses, and cars have enabled people to move farther from the center of the city, but still visit or work in the city. Hence, the urban area expands. That change illustrates how time-space compression, in the form of transportation improvements, has led to urban growth. The development of the Internet has allowed more people to work from home, which has further increased the distance people can live from cities.
Distribution and Size of Cities
Every urban settlement provides consumer services to people in a surrounding area, but not every settlement of a given size has the same number and types of business services. Business services disproportionately cluster in a handful of urban settlements, and individual settlements specialize in particular business services. Consumer services and business services do not have the same distributions. Consumer services generally follow a regular pattern based on size of settlements, with larger settlements offering more consumer services than smaller ones. Often a city exists in an urban system; an interdependent set of cities within a region.
Transportation
Geographer John Borchert developed his model of Urban Epochs to describe urban growth based on transportation technology. Each new form of technology produced a new system that changed how people moved themselves and goods in and between urban areas. He divided urban history into four time periods, which he called epochs. Each epoch had profound effects on the form (shape), size, density, and spatial arrangements of cities.
Exurbs
However, suburbanization itself is currently changing in North America as some suburbanites return to live in the city in a process known as re-urbanization, while others move further out into rural areas and work remotely, in a process known as exurbanization. While many people move into the city to be near cultural amenities, exurbanites are attracted to different features. Such as mountains, streams, or other elements of the physical landscape. Some people prefer the calm of a smaller, more isolated community to the vibrancy of a larger, more interconnected city.
Primate City Rule
If the settlement hierarchy does not graph as a straight line, then the country does not follow the rank-size rule. Instead, it may follow the primate city rule, in which the largest settlement has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement. In this distribution, the country's largest city is called the primate city. Mexico is an example of a country that follows the primate city distribution. Its largest settlement, Mexico City, is five times larger than its second-largest settlement, Guadalajara, rather than two times larger
Origin and Growth of Suburbs
In 1950, only 20 percent of Americans lived in suburbs compared to 40 percent in cities and 40 percent in small towns and rural areas. The percentage living in suburbs climbed rapidly thereafter. Ten years later, one-third of Americans lived in cities, one-third in suburbs, and one-third in small towns and rural areas. In 2000, 50 percent of Americans lived in suburbs compared to only 30 percent in cities and 20 percent in small towns and rural areas. Suburbs offer varied attractions—a detached single family dwelling rather than a row house or an apartment, private land surrounding the house, space to park cars, and a greater opportunity for home ownership.
Rank-Size Distribution
In many developed countries, ranking settlements from largest to smallest (population) produces a regular pattern. This is the rank-size rule, in which the country's nth-largest settlement is 1/n the population of the largest settlement. According to the rank-size rule, the second-largest city is one-half the size of the largest, the fourth-largest city is one-fourth the size of the largest, and so on. When plotted on logarithmic paper, the rank-size distribution forms a fairly straight line.
Brownfields
In urban planning, brownfield land is any previously developed land that is not currently in use that may be potentially contaminated. The term is also used to describe land previously used for industrial or commercial purposes with known or suspected pollution including soil contamination due to hazardous waste.
Reasons for gentrification
Investment opportunities Architectural or aesthetic value Connection to cultural centers Proximity to transportation lines Proximity to growth poles
Explain the internal structure of cities using various models and theories
Models and theories that are useful for explaining internal structures of cities include the Burgess concentric-zone model, the Hoyt sector model, the Harris and Ullman multiple nuclei model, the galactic city model, bid-rent theory, and urban models drawn from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa.
Residences in Europe
More people live downtown in cities outside North America. The CBD of Paris, which covers around 20 square kilometers (8 square miles), has about 450,000 inhabitants. A comparable area around the CBD of Detroit has around 25,000 inhabitants.
Consumer Services in Europe
More people live in Europe's CBDs in part because they are attracted to the concentration of consumer services, such as cultural activities and animated nightlife. And with more people living there, Europe's CBDs in turn contain more day-to-day consumer services, such as groceries, bakeries, and butchers.
Cities
Most definitions of "city" describe a place in which there is a relative concentration of people. Cities are places where people come together to build a nucleated, or clustered, settlements. The legal definition of a city is: a territory inside officially recognized boundaries. Most cities share boundaries with adjacent cities, yet those boundaries are visible only on a map. A collection of adjacent cities across which population density is high and continuous is a metropolitan area, or metro area. Most large cities in the world today are really metro areas of a series of legally defined cities, but they are referred to using only the name of the largest city (Example: Houston and its suburbs)
Suburban Retail and Services
Now that most residents in the United States live in suburbs, retail and services have developed in areas outside the CBD. Recent decades have seen growth in the size and number of stores. Strip malls and shopping malls have become common Big-box retail stores (Target, Best Buy, Walmart) have been successful Offices and business services have moved to the suburbs All of these changes are part of the suburbanization of businesses, the movement of commerce out of cities to suburbs where rent is cheaper and commutes for employees are shorter.
Percentage Living in Urban Settlements
Percentage of people living in urban settlements reflects a country's level of development
Explain how qualitative and quantitative data are used to show the causes and effects of geographic change within urban areas.
Quantitative data from census and survey data provide information about changes in population composition and size in urban areas. Qualitative data from field studies and narratives provide information about individual attitudes toward urban change.
Urban hearths
The Tigris-Euphrates Valley (Mesopotamia) The Nile River Valley -The Indus River Valley The Huang-He floodplains Urban centers also emerged in Mesoamerica and in South America
Suburbs
The advent of the automobile had profound effects on the growth of cities. Using cars and the highways built to facilitate their movement, the population of cities was able to spread out over ever-increasing distances from the urban core. The lower density suburbs that emerged developed as separate legal entities, but functioned as part of the metropolitan area focused on the central, or original, city. A suburb is a largely residential area adjacent to an urban area. Suburbanization is the process of people moving, usually from cities, to residential areas on the outskirts of a city. There they form communities that are connected to the city for jobs and services. However, they are usually less densely populated and less ethnically diverse than cities.
Burgess Concentric Zone Model
The concentric zone model describes a city (Chicago) as a series of rings that surrounds a central business district. - The first ring surrounding the CBD is a zone of transition that includes industrial land uses mixed with poorer quality housing. - Manufacturing there can take advantage of proximity to the city center workers and affordable land. -Housing in this zone often consists of older, subdivided homes that result in high density. Residential Zones - Burgess described three additional rings, all residential. - As distance from the CBD increased, he noted a zone of workingclass housing, followed by a ring of higher quality housing, and finally a zone of larger homes and lots in suburban areas on the edge of the city. - With greater distance from the CBD, land is less expensive, so homes are larger and on large lots. - People furthest from the city can afford transportation to take them to the CBD and back every day.
Metropolitan Area
The economic and cultural area of influence of a settlement extends beyond the urban area in the United States as well as other countries. The U.S. Bureau of the Census has created a method of measuring the larger functional area of a settlement, known as the metropolitan statistical area (MSA).
Public services in Europe
The most prominent structures in Europe's CBDs are often public and semipublic services, such as churches and former royal palaces, situated on the most important public squares. Parks in Europe's CBDs were often first laid out as private gardens for aristocratic families and later were opened to the public.
Origin, Function, and Growth of Cities
The most prosperous of the earliest agricultural settlements grew into urban centers shortly after the Neolithic Revolution (about 10,000 BCE) as human groups began to grow crops and domesticate animals. The most successful of these settlements became the world's first city-states, an urban center and its surrounding territory and agricultural villages. A city-state had its own political system and functioned independently from other city-states. Early city-states emerged in several locations around the globe in urban hearths, areas generally associated with river valleys in which seasonal floods and fertile soils aided the production of an agricultural surplus.
Modern City-State
The process of developing towns and cities is known as urbanization, an ongoing process that does not end once a city is formed. Involves the causes or and effects of existing cities that are growing ever larger. Urban v. Rural: Large size, high density, social heterogeneity More than 50% of the world's population lives in cities
Range of a Service
The range is the maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service. People are willing to go only a short distance for everyday consumer services, such as groceries and pharmacies. But they will travel longer distances for other services, such as a concert or professional ball game. The range must be modified further because most people think of distance in terms of time rather than in terms of a linear measure such as kilometers or miles. If you ask people how far they are willing to travel to a restaurant or a baseball game, they are more likely to answer in minutes or hours than in distance.
Gated Communities
The rise of gated communities is another example of a change in suburbs and occasionally in cities. These neighbourhoods are planned in order to control access and aesthetics within the community.
Threshold of a Service
The second piece of geographic information needed to compute a market area is the threshold, which is the minimum number of people needed to support the service. Every enterprise has a minimum number of customers required to generate enough sales to make a profit.
Density Gradient
This density change in an urban area is called the density gradient. According to the density gradient, the number of houses per unit of land diminishes as distance from the center city increases.
Colonial Legacy
When Europeans gained control of much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, their colonial policies left a heavy mark on many cities. One feature of European control was the imposition of standardized plans for cities. For example, all Spanish cities in Latin America were built according to the Laws of the Indies, drafted in 1573.
Explain how cities embody the processes of globalization
World cities function at the top of the world's urban hierarchy and drive globalization. Cities are connected globally by networks and linkages and mediate global processes.
Megacities
Worlds largest cities & typically have more than 10 million people. In the past century, high birth rates and rural-to-urban migration in less developed countries have made megacities more common. Megacities & Metacities are distinct spatial outcomes of urbanization increasingly located in countries of the periphery and semiperiphery
Site of settlements
absolute location of a city, cities static location, often chosen for trade, defense, or religion
Smart Growth
an approach to development that encourages a mix of building types and uses, diverse housing and transportation options, development within existing neighborhoods, and community engagement.
Squatter Settlements
are any collection of buildings where the people have no legal rights to the land they are built upon. The people are living there illegally and do not own the land. They provide housing for many of the world's poorest people and offer basic shelter.
Urban Area
consists of a central city and its surrounding built-up suburbs. The US census recognizes 2 types of urban areas; urbanized area- are with at least 50,000 inhabitants, and urban cluster- area with between 2,500 and 50,000 inhabitants
Causes contributing to the growing suburbanization in North America after WWII
economic expansion greater purchasing power growth of a car-centered lifestyle government's construction of a vast system of new highways allowed workers to commute from their city jobs to suburban homes.
White Flight
the phenomenon of white people moving out of urban areas, particularly those with significant minority populations, and into suburban areas.
Quantitative data
from census and survey data provide information about changes in population composition and size in urban areas. Data that is descriptive and conceptual Qualitative data from field studies and narratives provide information about individual attitudes toward urban change. This type of data is collected through methods of observation, one-to-one interviews, conducting focus groups, and similar methods. Questions that interviewer might ask: What are your thoughts about the city building a soccer stadium in this area? How would you feel about the city creating designated bike lanes in the downtown area? What changes have you noticed in your neighborhood over the past 20 years?
Qualitative data
from studies and narratives provide information about individual attitudes towards urban change. Data can be counted, measured, and expressed with numbers Who would use this data? Staes and local governments, business owners, hospitals,
Redlining
is a discriminatory practice that puts services (financial and otherwise) out of reach for residents of certain areas based on race or ethnicity.
Suburban Sprawl
is the development of suburbs at relatively low density and at locations that are not contiguous to the existing built-up area. When private developers select new housing sites, they seek cheap land that can easily be prepared for construction--land often not contiguous to the existing built-up area. Sprawl is also fostered by the desire of many families to own large tracts of land.
Explain how a city's infrastructure relates to local politics, society, and the environment
location and quality of a city's infrastructure directly affects its spatial patterns of economic and social development
Settlement
place with a permanent human population presence of an agricultural surplus and burial sites, rise of social stratification with a leadership class, beginning of job specialization (priests)
The Gravity Model
predicts that the optimal location of a service is directly related to the number of people in the area and inversely related to the distance people The gravity model states that places that are larger and closer together will have a greater interaction than places that are smaller and farther away from one another. This model can be used to predict the flow of workers, shoppers, vacationers, mail, migrants, and nearly any flow between cities. It holds that there are greater flows to bigger cities and greater flows between nearby cities.
New Urbanism
seeks to encourage local community development and sustainable growth in an urban area. Advocates of new urbanism would argue for greater accessibility for pedestrians in cities and a reduced dependency on cars and highways