ap human geography textbook pdf chapter 9 : The name of this chapter is Urban Geography. We’ll find answer some of important key questions including-
- When and why did people start living in cities?
- Where are cities located and why?
- How are cities organized, and how do they function?
- How do people shape cities?
- What role do cities play in globalization?
ap human geography textbook pdf chapter 9
The semicircular shaped Grand Circus Park in Detroit, Michigan is divided by several streets, making it look like the hub and spokes of a bicycle wheel from above. The grouping of buildings along Grand Circus Park (Fig 9.1) reflects the rise, fall, and revitalization of the central business district (CBD} in Detroit. The central business district is a concentration of business and commerce in the city’s downtown.
The Kales building is the tall building on the far left of the photograph. It was once the headquarters of the Kresge Corporation, which became K-Mart. Abandoned in 1986 and left to a state of disrepair, the Kales building was renovated at a cost of $15 million in 2005.
The Kales building now houses over 100 luxury apartments. In 2011, the Kales Building stood at 100 percent occupied. The short building to the right of the Kales building, tucked behind the trees, was the Adams Theater. Closed in 1988, the Adams Theater fell into a state of disrepair to the point that building could no longer be saved. The Downtown Detroit Development Authority required investors to save the fade of the building and allowed them to demolish the rest of it. A new building is slated to go up behind the facade.
When and why did people start living in cities?
Worldwide, more people live in urban areas than in rural areas today. China, a traditionally rural country, reached the point where more than 50 percent of its population lived in urban areas in 2010. According to China’s census, the country was 36.1 percent urban in 2000. The rapid urbanization of China is due to the migration of millions of people from rural to urban areas since economic liberalization began in 1979.
Urban refers to the built up space of the central city and suburbs. Urban areas include the city and surrounding environs connected to the city. An urban place is distinctively non-rural and non-agricultural.
For the vast majority of human history, the world was largely rural. From the beginnings of human society to about 3000 BC, less than 1 percent of people lived in urban areas. With cities established in Mesopotamia, the Nile River, Mesoamerica, and Asia, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities rose “only slightly.”
After tl1e start of the industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s in Great Britain, urbanization exploded “when some states such as Great Britain and the Netherlands became predominantly urban for the first time” (Soja 2010, 3 76). In western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, four out of five people live in cities or towns (Fig. 9.3). In China, the figure is five out of ten, and in India, the country’s 2011 census reported nearly 7 out of ten living in rural areas.
Where are cities located and why?
When you look at a map in an atlas of tl1e United States or Canada, or at a road map of a State or province, you see an array of places of different sizes, with varying distances between them. T he map looks like a jumble, yet each place is where it is because of some decision, some perception of the site or its situation.
Site and situation help explain why certain cities were planned and why cities thrive or fail. To understand why a conglomeration of cities is distributed across space the way it is and why cities are different sizes, it is necessary to examine more than one city at a time and see how those cities fit together, into the region, into the state, and into the globe as a whole.
Urban geographers studied the distribution of cities in Europe and the Americas during the 1900s, using quantitative techniques to determine how many cities and what size cities are needed within a certain space. In studying the size of cities and distances between them, urban geographers explored the trade areas of different size cities.
Every city and town has a trade area, an adjacent region within which its influence is dominant. Customers from smaller towns and villages come to the city to shop and to conduct other business. An online survey of approximately 50,000 people helped one armchair geographer create a map of trade areas for the contiguous United States (Fig. 9.19). The city’s newspapers are read, and its television stations are watched in the surrounding region (Fig. 9.20).
Across the multitude of quantitative studies in urban geography, three key components arose frequently: population, trade area, and distance. T he simplest way to think through the relationship among these tl1ree variables is to consider your State or province map. On the map, you will see many villages with unfamiliar names, a number of small towns sited on highways, several medium-sized cities where transportation routes converge, and likely one familiar, dominant city.
The largest city has the largest trade area, and as a result fewer places rival it as tl1e major trade area: the several medium-sized cities trade in smaller areas of commerce and are scattered apart from the major city, small towns house the grocery stores and other necessities, and finally villages may still have a cafe or a gas station. T he trade areas and population combine to give us a hierarchy of urban places, following a pattern commonly called the rank-size rule.
How are cities organized, and how do they function?
We all know that cities have certain features in common, and we use geographic terms to identify these features including downtown, suburbs, industrial districts, and shopping malls. Cities in various geographic regions of the world also have their own, distinct characteristics.
Mumbai, India, looks vastly different from Chicago, Illinois. Tokyo, Japan, is distinct from Lagos, Nigeria. Cities in South A.n1erica tend to be graced by often magnificent plazas not common in Australia or Russia.
One way to conceptualize the layout of cities is through models that illustrate the structures of cities. Since the 1920s, urban geographers have studied, charted, and mapped cities to create models that describe the urban morphology, functional zonation, and overall layout of cities in world regions.
City models reveal how cities are purposefully structured to perform the roles they have as centers of commerce, education, transportation, industry, and governance. The form of cities also reflects tl1e historic, spatial, economic, cultural, and political processes that shaped cities in each world region.
In this section of the chapter, we discuss a number of models that urban geographers have drawn for cities. In the next section, we discuss the people and institutions that organize and shape cities.
How do people shape cities?
People and institutions make places, and tl1e city is no exception to tl1 is rule. The roles individual people, governments, corporations, developers, financial lenders, and realtors play in shaping cities varies across the world. Government planning agencies can directly affect the layout of cities by restricting tl1e kinds of development allowed in certain regions or zones of cities.
Through zoning laws, cities define areas of the city and designate me kinds of development allowed in each zone. For example, Portland, Oregon, is often described as the best planned city in North America because it is built around free transportation in the central city to discourage the use of cars. Portland is a compact city with office buildings and residential zones in close proximity
to encourage walking, biking, and public transportation.
On the otl1er hand, Houston, Texas, is the only large city that does not have zoning laws on the books. Houstonites voted against the creation of zoning laws three different times (most recently in 1993).
In addition to government planni11g and zoning laws, people shape cities by choosing to live in certain neighborhoods and by opening stores, houses of worship, and even sporting fields tl1at reflect the values of their culture.
If you wander through neighborhoods of any city and pay close attention, you can see differences in the existence of single-family or multifamily homes, in particular styles of construction and building materials, in the distance between houses, in the nature and style of vegetation around houses, in the distance between the houses and the streets, and even in the amount of space devoted to automobile movement and storage.
What role do cities play in globalization?
Globalization, as we defined the term in the first chapter, is a set of processes and outcomes that occur on the global scale, circumventing and leaping over state boundaries to affect the world. In the processes of globalization, cities are taking over in ways we barely understand.
ap human geography textbook pdf chapter 9
Most statistics about economic activity at the global scale are gathered and disseminated by states. Nonetheless, many of the most important processes occur among and between cities, not states as a whole, masking the integral role world cities play in globalization. World cities function at the global scale, beyond the reach of the state borders, functioning as the service centers of the world economy.
Contending that models of cities and hierarchies of cities within states (such as Christaller) no longer represent what is happening with the city, Taylor and Lang maintain that the city has become “something else” than a simple CBD tied into a hierarchy of other cities within the state.
The world city is a node in globalization, reflecting processes that have “redrawn the limi ts on spatial interaction,” according to Felsenstein, Schamp, and Shachar. A node is a place through which action and interaction occur. As a node, a world city is connected to other cities, and the forces shaping globalization pulse across these connections and through the cities.
In conclusion
The city is an ever changing cultural landscape, its layers reflecting grand plans by governments, impassioned pursuits by individuals, economic decisions by corporations, and processes of globalization. Geographers who study cities have a multitude of topics to examine.
From gentrification to tear downs, from favelas to McMansions, from spaces of production to spaces of consumption, from ancient walls to gated communities, cities have so much in common, and yet each has its own pulse, its own feel, its own spatial structure, its own set of realities. T he pulse of the city is undoubtedly created by the peoples and cultures who live there. For it is the people, whether working independently or as part of global institutions, who continuously create and re-create tl1e city and its geography.
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