Environment & urbanisation

How do humans impact the environment? We could start here, with videos on stuff.

Take the footprint quiz. I think we live modestly in HK: no car, vegetarian, mama is cruel on the air con. But we run two fridges, buy milk from Australia, and travel by air to England, burning up the atmosphere as we go. What adjustments do you think we can make?

What can we do as citizens and consumers that put pressure on the manufacturers and producers? Is consumer pressure an effective way to tackle industrial waste problems, pollution, toxic runoff, resource depletion, landscape destruction, habitat loss?

Individual pressure is fine, but change also has to grow from institutions and communities. Not all is doom and gloom. There are projects which seek to create urban spaces that don't trash the environment. Find out about Eco Cities project; Sustainable cities; Transition network.

Let's spend some time this week reviewing the materials and making notes.

Be a planner

Okay, you are now in charge of planning an urban area.

Build a city from scratch.

What are you going to put in it? How are you going to avoid problems? Can you ensure that your plan copes with every challenge I'm going to throw at it, with all my questions about public services, transport, housing, employment, infrastructure, environment, building design and culture*?

Plan carefully! Take a moment to consider the favelas, shanty towns, tent cities, and squatter dwellings.

Let's go through this slideshow together about Kibera.

Now, here's the Dateline programme about those ghost towns in China.

City design from the air, here.

*I just want a jolly decent place to live where everyone is nice to each other and there is free ice cream every Wednesday.

How is land used? And why?

More about settlement. We'll tour! First, Hong Kong and our own home town. What's the same and different about these places? (There are similarities of land use, honest!)

Then let's think about other locations. At this point, the cities, towns, and rural areas in Brazil.

We'll do a lot of talk this week. Make sure you write ideas down for your notes.

Also, ask the IT Expert about More Economically Developed Countries and Less Economically Developed Countries. He will have a good line on those.

A geographer might describe urban and rural land use in terms of zones. Here are links to follow with breakfast this week (alongside Cake Lady's Danish pastries, mama's fruit salad, and Ritter's helpful contribution to your delicious, reward-in-advance, home-made pain au chocolat): Definitions, Diagrams, More diagrams, Slideshow.

Lots of interesting links too, on this page of OpenGecko.

A student looks at zones between the city centre and rural/urban fringe. You will need to pause the animation to read the screens.

Settlement: Urban and rural

We're living in quite a good location to compare urban and rural settlements.

All the islands of Hong Kong started off with much the same appearance less than two hundred years ago.

Look at the village we live in, compared to Hong Kong Central; can you think of reasons why one has expanded as it has, but the other location has experienced a much slower rate of development?

Let's talk that over, and make a visit to the Planning and Infrastructure gallery again.

If you'd like a capital cities quiz at this point, try yacapaca.