Human Geo Unit 6 Lecture Notes

Key Issues in Urban Patterns

• Why do services cluster downtown?

• Where are people distributed within urban areas?

• Why are urban areas expanding?

• Why do cities face challenges?

Why Do Services Cluster Downtown?

3 CBD Land Uses

• Types of Services:

  • Public Services:

  • Examples: City hall, courts, libraries.

  • Centrally located for accessibility.

  • Business Services:

  • Examples: Advertising agencies, banks.

  • Proximity enhances collaboration.

  • Consumer Services:

  • High-threshold, high-range retailers.

  • Shopping habits changing; affluent moving to suburbs.

Competition for Land

• High Demand: Causes vertical development. (building upwards instead of outwards)

• Underground CBD: Utilities like cables buried for space efficiency (build underground because there is no space aboveground).

• Skyscrapers: Economically viable due to demand for space.

Where Are People Distributed Within Urban Areas?

Urban Structure Models

• Concentric Zone Model (Burgess, 1923):

  • 1st model to explain the distribution of different social groups within urban areas

  • City grows outward in concentric rings.

  • Rings: CBD → Zone in Transition → Working-Class Homes → Better Residences → Commuter's Zone.

• Sector Model (Hoyt, 1939):

  • Develops in sectors or wedges from the center.

• Multiple Nuclei Model (Harris and Ullman, 1945):

  • Cities have multiple centers or nuclei (e.g., ports, universities).

Geographic Applications

• Understanding Patterns: Different social characteristics influence where people live.

• Critiques: Too simple for contemporary urban patterns; blending models often clarifies urban demographics.

• European Examples: Wealthy often live in inner portions; newer housing is often multi-family projects for low-income.

• Developing Countries: Wealthy near city centers, poorer residents in outskirts or suburbs.

• The combination of the 3 models supports the idea that people prefer to live near others who have similar characteristics to them.

Why Are Urban Areas Expanding?

Defining Urban Areas

• Urban Settlements/Central City: Legally incorporated units.

• Urban Area: Dense core, suburbs, and linkages.

  • Urban Cluster - urban area with a population between 2,500 and 50,000.

  • Urbanized Area: Minimum of 50,000 inhabitants.

• Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA): method of measuring the functional area of a city, includes urbanized area, the country within which the city is located, and adjacent counties.

Urban Sprawl and Segregation

• Sprawl: Spread of development over a larger area.

• Segregation: Residential areas separated by social class, restrictive zoning laws.

Transportation Transformations

• Motor Vehicles: permit large-scale suburb development further from the CBD.

• Future Vehicles: Alternative-fuel vehicles, hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cells.

• Public Transit: More energy and cost-efficient, often overlooked in favor of private vehicle benefits.

Why Do Cities Face Challenges?

Urban Deterioration Processes

• Filtering: Larger houses divided for lower-income families leads to decline.

• Redlining: Illegal designation by banks to limit loans in certain areas.

• Public Housing: Often inadequate for families; managed by local housing authorities.

• Gentrification: middle-class people move into deteriorated inner-city neighborhoods and renovate the housing. Often displaces low-income families as property values increase, causing a shift in the community demographic.

Economic Challenges

• Underclass Issues: Permanent underclass suffers from various social problems including unemployment, illiteracy, and crime.

• Culture of Poverty: Impacts community stability and children's upbringing.

• Tax Base Erosion: Low-income inner-city residents require public services, but can't pay the taxes that fund them, leading to budget deficits and service cuts during recessions.

• Impact of the Recession: lower assessed values of houses led to lower tax revenues acquired from proper taxes, leading the the housing market collapsing

Summary

• services cluster in the CBD, and sometimes some consumer services (leisure)

• the three models help explain where different groups of people live within urban areas

• urban growth has been focused on mainly in suburbs that surround older cities

• cities face physical, social, and economic difficulties, but also improvements