Week 6: Urban Forms and Ecology

In class this week we talked about urban forms. Urban areas are more like continuums where they contain diverse areas such as rural, villages, towns, secondary cities and larger cities. As a result of the diverse areas, there is a bid rent curve. This curve shows that as the distant from the inner city increases, the rent or cost for housing decreases. Since you are further away from the city, you are able to get more land as well. Having cheaper prices or lower rent and more land is a trade off from being in the accessible location. Studies have shown that mostly retail stores are located in the inner city, followed by industry or commercial, then apartments, and finally single homes.

  http://stonito.com/images/picture/?id=1308

There is also a Zone of Concentric Model that contains 5different zones. Zone 1 is CBD which is mainly commercial, social and business hubs; Zone 2 is factories where there are manufacturing and distribution operations close to CBD and labor pools; Zone 3 and 4 are transition and working class zones; and Zone 5 is the commuter zone.

http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch6en/conc6en/img/burgess.gif

        We also talked about ecology, more specifically, urban ecology. Urban ecology is a subfield of ecology which deals with the interactions of plants, animals and humans with each other and with their environment in urban or urbanizing settings. By looking at the relations between plants, animals and humans, we hope to create healthier and better managed communities.

Week 5: Poverty and Urban Divisions

In today's society, the most frequent terms that dived the urban population is the economy and its income. One huge element that effects other elements which create the divisions of an city such as education, housing, employment, income, health, and crime, is poverty. As time has passed, statistical facts associated with neighborhoods of poverty have made it difficult to analyze the problem in structural terms because of non-marital and teenage births, students dropping out of school, violence in the street and in the home, and substance and drug abuse. Poverty is probably the biggest issue today in all urban areas and cities and studies prove that it is one of the greatest negative impact towards society. It reduces the development rate of the society as well as the economy rate. 

In this New York Times newspaper article, the author stresses how much poverty can affect education on students who are less fortunate. No Child Left Behind, administered by President George W. Bush, is based on the premise that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education. The Act requires states to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades, if those states are to receive federal funding for schools. But this Act only set unrealistically high expectations for all schools. However, President Obama decided that making schools more "efficient" through means like judging teachers by students' test scores instead of setting standards for every school in America. The article states that data from the National assessment of Educational Progress proves that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores. Among the fifteen year old students in America, students with lower economic statuses had far lower test scores that more advantaged counterparts within the United States and the rest of the world. Did you know that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international test is unrelated to the face that one fifth of American Children live in poverty?


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/the-unaddressed-link-between-poverty-and-education.html?pagewanted=all

Simple Cycle of Poverty

Week 4: Crossing the divide

During the previous week, we looked at urbanization; the good and the bad. What did we find out? A large divide occurs between the rich and the poor, and this gap is greater in cities than elsewhere. Why? As more people flock from rural to urban areas, they compete with those already residing in cities for jobs. With high demand for a single job, the value decreases; the employer on the other hand continues to make profit and grows richer. This creates a social stratification whereby there is a minority upper class (the owners of the means), the fairly large middle class, and the majority lower class. This inequality is one reason why people turned out en masse last September to protest against Wall Street. The movement was dubbed Occupy Wall Street. These individuals occupied Wall street so as not to occupy the same position on the social ladder for the rest of their lives.

Inequality is not necessarily bad (remember we have unequal intelligence levels), for if everyone was equally rich, who would pave the roads or manufacture cars? Mobility(or immobility) is the problem; people cannot go from rag to riches, if I may. In an NPR article, Mr. Cowen states that people produce offspring whose success in the future depends on their parents'. Based on this thinking one can explain why inequality results in a triangle that tapers as you move up. The employer mentioned in the previous paragraph is less likely to produce more offspring (as determined in other studies) than his/her lower employees. Therefore, the individual at the tip of the triangle produces one person like him/herself while each of the individuals at the bottom wrung produce three more.

If a Gini index (which we also looked at) of 0 is to be achieved, society would not function; therefore, our attention should be focused on making it easier for the lower class to make ends meet through reduced taxes and subsidies, and making upward mobility on the social ladder possible periodically. If you find a society where Socialism has been very successful, then a Gini index of zero might be achievable.

P.s. In a comment I made last week on the influence of media, I mentioned that media (movies in particular)dictate what direction we are headed. The masks used to protest in the movie "V for Vendetta" were the ones used by the protesters on Wall Street. Note the picture.

-O.I.

Week 3 Urban Tomography

This week, our class discussions revolved around urban tomography. Urban tomography are ways we can observe the movements and patterns within the city and how they interact with each other. You use slices of the cat scan like pictures and view it from different angles. There are different types of tomography such as x-rays, GPS, cat scans and audio; each type is very different from one another. By using urban tomography, it helps us capture how the city or urban life was like at a certain period.

For a better example, this video gives you different visuals of urban tomography. In the beginning, the video shows slices of a forest with each picture being from different angles. Together, it makes up one area.   http://vimeo.com/18027928

      Another activity we did during class was watch a video of The City. The movie showed a theme of the progression of technology. In the beginning, the tools were more self-sustained then gradually became mass produced. The people became more focused on results rather than consequences. As a result of the booming technology, pollution began to contaminate urban areas. We also discussed that if we were to create our own theme, we came up with the idea to show how much technology has taken over our lives and how that will affect our future generation in the long run.