Intro to Human Geograpphy Long Response

Choose one of the following models of urban structure: African, Latin American, or Southeast Asian and compare it to the model of urban structure of a European city. Highlight both differences and similarities.

Urban Structure of a European City:

— Determined by founding date:

⭐️Cities built during Roman Empire are often sited on prime trade locations, with narrow and winding roads leading to trade center.

⭐️Cities built during Middle Ages typically have town centers with an elaborate church on one end, town hall on other end, and shops around the square. Residential zones near the center are high-rent due to proximity to amenities.

-Center surrounded by preindustrial periphery

-Outside preindustrial core is a ring of industrial or postindustrial suburbs.

-Suburbs may be centers of commerce, residential zones with immigrants and guest workers, or bedroom communities.

-European cities typically have a dense pattern of housing, retail, other businesses, municipal buildings and churches.

-If the city still has a pre-industrial era section, then the streets are uneven and narrow, crooked maybe. If this were replaced by industrial era buildings, then the streets are bigger and the factories might still be there (or closed down now) or recycled into newer uses.

-There was not much planning in these older areas, but newer zones outside are newer and some are residential and some industrial suburbs surrounding.

African City Model:

- The African model city would have a small European-like CBD, from colonial times (when the Europeans controlled and designed the city), but also a periodic market area and a transitional area where there are shops and stalls.

- If it was a mining city, the mine is probably right there in the city, and there are shantytowns all around, housing the many low income people.

-The only area where there are maybe high-rise buildings is in the colonial CBD, and most other areas have just one-story buildings.

-Shantytowns are unplanned groups of crude dwellings and shelters made of scrap wood, iron, and pieces of cardboard that develop around cities.

Define urban sprawl and describe the landscape of sprawl typical to North American cities. How does new urbanism respond to urban sprawl?  What criticism has been made of attempts to construct communities along new urbanist lines?

-A product of the auto age, urban sprawl has become common in the U.S. Though there is much of it in the Sun Belt and the West, it also happens in other areas.

-Instead of building cities "up," we have built our cities "out." There are large lots for houses, no control on the direction or pace of growth, "green field" commercial developments like Walmarts, strip malls, and lots of roads. You need a car to move around, because it's too far to walk anywhere.

-New urbanism is an effort to plan in a different way, to make the housing and other developments more human scale, more like small towns, with higher densities and a community feel - and more walkable. Celebration, Florida is one new urbanist development. Some say that this kind of development doesn't really change the way that the wealthy control the organization of space and the social conditions that disadvantage low income people.

Define a world city in relation to globalization and describe the different methods used to understand and classify world cities, their interactions, their connectedness and their influence on globalization.

-The world-city is a node in globalization. As nodes, world cities are connected to other world cities, and through these connections, world-cities act as forces shaping globalization.

-Globalization refers to increasing interdependence, and deepening relations across country borders. Most important processes of globalization happen between world cities, not rural areas.

-World cities function at the global scale, beyond national borders, as nodes in the global economy.

-To help understand their influence and classify world cities, Geographers Jon Beaverstock and Peter J. Taylor have outlined Alpha, Beta and Gamma world cites. Examples of Alpha++ cities include New York and London. They remain at the top in terms of influence in the world economy. World cities are also often capital cities. Examining the connections among world cities helps us to understand processes of globalization better.

There are extremes of development within all countries. Describe places at each end of the spectrum within a developed county and compare the description with places of extreme wealth and poverty within a peripheral country. In what ways are they similar and in what ways do they differ?

-Within different countries, there can be extremes of development

-whether they are "rich" or "poor" countries. For instance, the U.S. has states that are quite wealthy, and have big per capita incomes and high scores in many other measures of development.

-Political realities can influence this, as can economic forces.

-New Orleans' Ninth Ward was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, because the levees didn't protect it well enough - which was in part the impact of government policies about where to build levees and where to allow people to build houses over the decades - as well as the hurricane itself.

-Many thought the government's response to the disaster - and the images of the poor neighborhoods impacted by the storm - were like that of developing world country, poor in all respects.

-Parts of Washington, D.C. show the height of wealth and power, but there are really poor people living just blocks away - because of years of disadvantage.

-Similarly, some U.S. rural areas have high-tech wealthy farms and some have poverty with little mechanization. There are some rich people within any poor country, too, and their neighborhoods might look like an American or European wealthy suburb.

-Many of the rich in a poor country are well connected with the core countries, and probably have investments not only in their own poor country's businesses, but also in Europe or America. The majority of their country's people probably live in poverty, working in factories the wealthy few might own or run. And the poverty of the poor countries is much worse than the poverty of the wealthy countries.

Discuss several types of barriers to development. What can governments do to remove those barriers?

-Barriers to development include bad leadership and corruption in countries, high growth rates, high levels of poverty, and high incidence of disease, and lack of educational opportunities.

-High foreign debt also weighs down a peripheral country's chance of rising to semi- or core status - and it may never happen.

-It's hard to tell whether these bad conditions made the world economy like it is, or if the capitalist world economy made these countries so "bad off."

-All the things that the core countries enjoy, in terms of clean water and adequate sanitation, good nutrition and health care - all linked to wealth - are things that periphery countries struggle to achieve.

-These are barriers to development, and the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN are trying to help remove them.

-Big foreign debt acts to keep poor countries poor, because they can never pay it off and the interest hurts them.

-Bad leadership, with one example being what happened in Zimbabwe, keeps wealth and investors away, and keeps the country mired in poverty and the periphery.

Analyze how the rise of agribusiness changed the rural landscape and environment.

-Agribusiness is an encompassing term for a business that has total control over all aspects of farming: including giving the baby chicks to the farmers to raise as well as setting prices.

-But it also has concentrated agricultural activities, and become more vertically integrated, with the same huge companies owning the farms, the storage facilities, processing plants - and selling the finished products in the stores.

-The global trading market and many technologies have helped agribusiness grow so big. They control the means of production and they seem to control the markets, too.

-The majority of chickens and hogs raised for markets in the U.S., for example, are concentrated in just a few areas of production - chickens in Virginia, Georgia, and Arkansas, with huge concentrations of hog producers in Iowa - mostly controlled by just a few companies in each case.

-The rural landscape has changed with factory farms taking the place of smaller more dispersed family farms.

-There are huge grain storage facilities and enormous processing plants, like for beef slaughtering or even ethanol for fuel. Their impacts on the environment are huge, with concentrated manure from a factory farm more like a city's worth of waste than a farm's small impacts.

Discuss the positive and negative impacts of the Green Revolution.

-Since the 1930s agricultural scientists experimented with technologically manipulated seed varieties to increase crop yields and chemical fertilizers and pesticides to control pests.

-The Green Revolution also brought new high-yield varieties of wheat and corn from the United States to other parts of the world, particularly South and Southeast Asia.

-Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are found in 75 percent of all processed foods in the United States

-Environmentalists have speculated about the impacts of pollen dispersal from genetically modified plants and the potential for disease-resistant plants to spur the evolution of super-pests.

-The large-scale monocropping that is often part of Green Revolution agriculture can make farms vulnerable to changes in climate or the infestation of particular pests.

-Higher inputs of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides associated with Green Revolution agriculture can lead to reduced organic matter in the soil and to groundwater pollution.

-Scientific American (2005) explains that the Green Revolution has done little to alleviate poverty in areas where most farmers still work small plots of land.

-The need for capital from the West to implement Green Revolution technologies has led to a shift away from production for local consumers toward export agriculture.

-Shifts from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture have had dramatic impacts on rural life.

-Dramatic increases in the production of export crops have occurred at the expense of crop production for local consumption.

-Environmental, economic, and social changes have affected local rural communities.

-"The suicide rate for farmers (in America) is more than double that of veterans."

List some of the causes of deforestation. Analyze the implications of this destruction. What could humanity lose when the rain forests are gone?

-Loggers cutting roads into the rain forest and taking out the valuable hardwood trees they value causes deforestation.

-Others can move in behind, like landless farmers looking to grow crops, or wealthy farmers and ranchers looking to grow soybeans or graze cattle for fast food chains in the U.S. Oil companies or gold miners also cut into the rainforest to make money off the underground mineral resources.

-The forests have been under attack for decades now, and until recently, the pace had always been accelerating. Brazil, Indonesia, and equatorial Africa have seen enormous forest loss.

-Only recently has some replanting progress been attributed to slowing the deforestation rates.

-Deforestation will cause humanity will lose the great biodiversity, of course, but also there will be less of a chance of slowing global warming, as the carbon will not be stored in the big tropical rainforests. Palm oil production is contributing to significant deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Analyze and discuss some of the reasons that many environmental problems are now considered global rather simply regional or local in nature, citing several examples.

-Environmental issues cross borders and therefore are considered a global problem. Causes may be located in one country but the impact may be felt much further away.

-For example, waste produced in core regions of the world is exported to the periphery where it causes significant harm to the people and environment.

-Global climate change has many sources: greenhouse gasses come from the US, Western Europe, China and other industrial countries, and our warming of the earth has impacts for us all - industrial and nonindustrial.

What is sustainable development? Provide two examples from the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and explain how they help address global environmental challenges.

- Brundtland report defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

⭐️Goal One: clean water and sanitation- Billions of people will lack access to these basic services in 2030 unless progress quadruples. Demand for water is rising owing to rapid population growth, urbanization and increasing water needs from agriculture, industry, and energy sectors. By managing our water sustainably, we are also able to better manage our production of food and energy and contribute to decent work and economic growth. Moreover, we can preserve our water ecosystems, their biodiversity, and take action on climate change. Water availability is becoming less predictable in many places. In some regions, droughts are exacerbating water scarcity and thereby negatively impacting people’s health and productivity and threatening sustainable development and biodiversity worldwide. Ensuring that everyone has access to sustainable water and sanitation services is a critical climate change mitigation strategy for the years ahead.

⭐️Goal two: Affordable and Clean Energy- The world continues to advance towards sustainable energy targets – but not fast enough. At the current pace, about 660 million people will still lack access to electricity and close 2 billion people will still rely on polluting fuels and technologies for cooking by 2030. For many decades, fossil fuels such as coal, oil or gas have been major sources of electricity production, but burning carbon fuels produces large amounts of greenhouse gases which cause climate change and have harmful impacts on people’s well-being and the environment. This affects everyone, not just a few. Moreover, global electricity use is rising rapidly. In a nutshell, without a stable electricity supply, countries will not be able to power their economies.

Where do you get your news? Do you depend upon media networks or do you seek alternative sources? How has the rise of the Internet and social media influenced centralized media?

I’ll write my own thing for this

How does globalization and the development of networks integrate some places and marginalize others? Give examples of both outcomes.

-Globalization can certainly help the development of networks. Since trade is the backbone of globalization, this connects places together.

-For example, when we buy grapes from Chile, this links the US together with another country and strengthens our relationship. It also benefits US consumers as they realize that fruit can be purchased in any season because it is globalized.

-When we also choose not to do business with a country, this also marginalizes their country. Many countries cannot compete in the globalized world because their country may be lacking in infrastructure necessary for shipping, their business may be too small to compete in such a market, or they simply may not have the resources available that others do.

-Therefore, while many countries will benefit from globalization, there are others that have negative outcomes.