Sunday, January 21, 2024

Monday, January 22 - Friday, January 26. 2024

Welcome to the last week of Semester 1. Below you'll find the information that we'll cover for the week. 

Monday's schedule is ABCD
Tuesday's schedule is CDAB
Wednesday is FLEX
Thursday's schedule is DCBA and
Friday's schedule is BADC


A Block Legal Studies - We are in the Library / Learning Commons finishing our civil litigator exam/project. It's due Friday so email it to me or print it off and hand it to me please...thank you. 


If you are missing work (check MyEdBC) please submit it to me. If you are interested in Law school...from the Counsel of Canadian Law Deans website...There are 24 law schools across Canada: seven in the Western Region, nine in Ontario, five in Quebec and three in the Atlantic Region. Canadian law schools offer a variety of programs: the juris doctor (J.D.) and traditional bachelor of laws (LL.B); professional degrees leading to the practice of law, graduate studies in law, and various joint programs. In British Columbia there are three schools offering Law Degrees: the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and Thompson Rivers University. For the juris doctor (J.D.) programs at all three schools, you'll need an undergrad degree first (BA, BSc, BBA, BComm, BEng. BMus, BPHE, BKin, or at least 3 years (90 credits) or more of an approved course of studies leading to an undergraduate degree and you'll have to write the LSAT (Law School Administration Test). To find out more about Legal job futures check out WorkBC Lawyers or Paralegals. You can also check out the BC Law Society's Considering a Career in Law online brochure.

  


B Block Human Geography - We're off to the Learning Commons so you may work on your your term/semester long Urbanization SimCity Buildit  project. Remember, for this project, I needed you to build a city and as you played, keep a track of what you did, why you did it and what the results were. You will need to make a presentation (either video, podcast, prezi, power point, webpage or a straight up written report) with photos and a written a narrative (minimum 500 words) describing your city’s key features and design attributes. 

The purpose of the City Narrative is to give me a quick overview of the future city’s infrastructure and its public services. Think of the City Narrative as a marketing piece that answers:

  • What basic information should people know about your city (such as the name, population, age, and location)?
  • What unique features does your city offer that make it unique?
  • Why would someone want to live in your city? Are there any special benefits to living in your city?
  • How did you lay out your city? Why did you do it in that manner?
  • What kinds of industrial, commercial, and residential areas did you build? How did you decide where build them?
  • What services (police, fire, medical, education) does your city provide? Where did you place them and why so?
  • What is important to know about your city’s physical components (landmarks, parks, and recreation areas) and infrastructure (transportation, energy, waste disposal, pollution control)?
  • How do you provide power to all areas of your city? Do you have renewable energy sources?
  • How does your city dispose of waste and recycle?
  • How do you manage pollution (water and air) in your city?
  • What types of transportation are available to move citizens and goods throughout your city?
AND most importantly a summation 
  • What did you learn about urban planning and city design (leadership, resource allocation, population satisfaction, trade, taxation and alternative sources of funding, city planning, services, and perception of politicians)?
If you choose to make a video, you can use these online video uploading sites 


If you choose to make a website then try
Wix
Office 365 Sway (through your Comox Valley School District Poral)
 
And BTW from CBC on Tuesday...
While there has been increasing demand for urban and land use planners all across the province, filling those vacant planning positions has been difficult. "Our job posting activity increased by 93 per cent from 2020 to 2021,". Experts indicate the shortage is a result of fewer individuals enrolling in planning courses and a growing number of experienced planners retiring from their positions.

I will be grading you using the following core competencies and skills:
  • Discuss what goes into planning and maintaining a city using geographic inquiry processes and skills to ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze data and ideas; and communicate findings and decisions 
  • Draw conclusions about the variation and distribution of geographic phenomena over time and space through identifying basic city services and features (such as emergency services, transportation, and education), along with areas of zoning and the services that comprise city infrastructure (commercial, residential, and industrial)
  • Evaluate how particular geographic actions or events influence human practices or outcomes through describing the consequences of decisions regarding various city functions (taxes, budget, services, etc.)
  • Assess the significance of places by identifying the physical and/or human features that characterize them through explaining the importance of city location, placement of city features, and proportions in zoning
  • Identify and assess how human and environmental factors and events influence each other in order to identify and build features that best represent successful city design.


The report and game play are based around the following key issues/outcomes from the course:
  • Where Are Services Distributed? 
A service is any activity that fulfills a human want or need and returns money to those who provide it.  Services cluster in developed countries because more people who can buy services live there and within developed countries, larger cities offer a larger scale of services than do small towns because more customers live there. The service sector of the economy is subdivided into three types: consumer services (retail and wholesale services, leisure and hospitality services, health and social services, and education), business services (transportation and information services, professional services, and financial services), and public services (provide security and protection for citizens and businesses). 


  • Where Are Consumer Services Distributed?
Generally speaking, we spend as little time and effort as possible obtaining consumer services and therefore go to the nearest place that fulfills our needs. We travel greater distances only if the price is much lower or if the item is unavailable locally. A central place is a market center for the exchange of goods and services by people attracted from the surrounding area. The central place is so called because it is centrally located to maximize accessibility. Businesses in central places compete against each other to serve as markets for goods and services for the surrounding region. The area surrounding a service from which customers are attracted is the market area or hinterland. The Range of a Service is the maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service. People are willing to go only a short distance for everyday consumer services, such as groceries and pharmacies. But they will travel longer distances for other services such as a concert or professional ball game. As a rule, people tend to go to the nearest available service. Larger settlements provide consumer services that have larger thresholds, ranges, and market areas. The gravity model predicts that the optimal location of a service is directly related to the number of people in an area and inversely related to the distance people must travel to access it. The best location will be the one that minimizes the distances that all potential customers must travel to reach the service. To that end look at Central Place Theory, the Application of Central Place Theory, market areas, market area analysis, range of service, threshold of service and the gravity model (of services). Look at the rank-size rule and the primate city rule (in terms of services). 

From the Geographic Book website linked above...

Application of Central Place Theory:

Planning and Zoning - Central Place Theory has been used to determine the appropriate distribution of land uses within a region. By understanding the hierarchy of settlements and the range of goods and services provided by each settlement, planners can ensure that essential goods and services are accessible to all residents.

Transportation Planning - Transportation planning is another area where Central Place Theory has been applied. By understanding the range of goods and services provided by each settlement, transportation planners can design transportation networks that ensure that all residents have access to essential goods and services.

Retail Location - Central Place Theory has been used extensively in the retail industry. By understanding the range of goods and services provided by each settlement, retailers can determine the best location for their stores to maximize their customer base.

Land Use Planning - Central Place Theory has also been used in land use planning. By understanding the hierarchy of settlements and the range of goods and services provided by each settlement, planners can determine the appropriate mix of land uses within a region to ensure that all residents have access to essential goods and services.


  • Where Are Business Services Distributed?
Global cities are most closely integrated into the global economic system because they are at the center of the flow of information and capital. Business services (including financial institutions, headquarters of large corporations, and lawyers, accountants, and other professional services) concentrate in disproportionately large numbers in global cities. In the global economy, developing countries specialize in two distinctive types of business services: offshore financial services and back-office functions (also known as business-process outsourcing or BPO). Typical back-office functions include insurance claims processing, payroll management, transcription work, and other routine clerical activities. These businesses typically located in developing countries for a number of reasons, including the presence of supportive laws, weak regulations, and low-wage workers. The economic activities in a settlement can be divided into two types: basic and non-basic businesses. A settlement’s distinctive economic structure derives from its basic industries, which export primarily to consumers outside the settlement. Non-basic industries are enterprises whose customers live in the same community. In a postindustrial society, such as the United States or Canada, increasingly the basic economic activities are in business, consumer, or public services (while Vancouver’s basic sector in transshipment also has a cluster of business sectors that complement one another). Attracting talented individuals is important for a city because these individuals are responsible for promoting economic innovation. They are likely to start new businesses and infuse the local economy with fresh ideas.




  • Why Do Services Cluster in Settlements?
We generally find that most services are clustered in settlements. Rural settlements are centers for agriculture and provide a small number of services; urban settlements are centers for consumer and business services. One-half of the people in the world currently live in a rural settlement, and the other half in an urban settlement. A clustered rural settlement is an agricultural-based community in which several families live near each other, with fields surrounding the collection of houses and farm buildings. A dispersed rural settlement is characterized by farmers living on individual farms isolated from neighbors rather than alongside other farmers in settlements. In developing countries, migration from the countryside is fueling half of the increase in population in urban settlements, even though job opportunities may be scarce. Like I mentioned above Services cluster in developed countries because more people who can buy services live there and within developed countries, larger cities offer a larger scale of services than do small towns because more customers live there. 




  • "Why Do Services Cluster Downtown"? 
An urban area consists of a central city and its surrounding built-up suburbs. Downtown is the best-known and the most visually distinctive area of most cities. It is usually one of the oldest districts in a city, often the site of the original settlement. The downtowns of most North American cities have different features than those in the rest of the world.  The central business district (CBD) is the core of the city where many services cluster. Services are attracted to the CBD because of its accessibility. Public services typically located in a CBD include city hall, courts, county and state or provincial agencies, and libraries. Public services are located in the CBD to facilitate access for people living in all parts of town. Sports facilities and convention centers are found in the CBD and attract many suburbanites and out-of-towners. Cities place these facilities in the CBD because they hope to stimulate business for downtown restaurants, bars, and hotels. People in business services such as advertising, banking, journalism, and law depend on proximity for professional colleagues. Even with the diffusion of modern communications, many professionals still exchange information with colleagues primarily through face-to-face contact. A central location also helps businesses that employ workers from a variety of neighborhoods. Outside of North America, CBDs are less likely to be dominated by commercial services. They instead feature religious or historical structures and parks. European cities display a legacy of low-rise structures and narrow streets, built as long ago as medieval times. Some European cities try to preserve their historic CBDs by limiting high rise buildings and the number of cars. CBDs outside of North America are also more likely to have residents. However, the 24-hour supermarket is rare outside of a North American CBD because of shopkeeper preferences, government regulations, and long-time shopping habits. Many CBDs outside of North America ban motor vehicles from busy shopping streets. Shopping streets reserved for pedestrians are widespread in Northern Europe, including in the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia

Try to examine North American and non North American downtown cores.



  •  "Where Are People Distributed Within Urban Areas"? 
Look at three North American models of urban development: The concentric zone model; the sector model; and the multiple nuclei model. None of the three models taken individually completely explains why different types of people live in distinctive parts of the city. But if the models are combined rather than considered independently, they help geographers explain where different types of people live in a city. People tend to reside in certain locations depending on their personal characteristics. This does not mean that everyone with the same characteristics must live in the same neighborhood, but the models say that most people prefer to live near others who have similar characteristics. Now European cities display different patterns from North American cities. Poor residents live in the outskirts and wealthy residents live closer to the core. Wealthy people are attracted by the opportunity to occupy elegant residences in carefully restored, beautiful old buildings (gentrification). Most of the newer housing built in the suburbs is high-rise apartment buildings for low-income people or people who have immigrated.



You should also look at the differences between North American, European and Latin American city development.


For Latin American city models, the "elite spine" and squatter settlements check out:





  • "Why Are Urban Areas Expanding"? 
According to the peripheral model, an urban area consists of an inner city surrounded by large suburban residential and business areas tied together by a beltway or ring road. Around the beltway are nodes of consumer and business services called edge cities. The edge cities originated as suburban residences for people who worked in the central cities and then shopping malls were built near the residents. Because Census Metropolitan Areas in Canada are composed of many independent suburbs (edge cities) and central cities as well as counties, local governments are fragmented and less able to deal with regional problems. In British Columbia, Metro Vancouver (formerly the Greater Vancouver Regional District) is a partnership of 21 municipalities (Vancouver, New Wesminister, Surrey, Richmond, Maple Ridge, Burnaby, Coquitlam, etc.…) and is a political body and corporate entity operating under provincial legislation as a ‘regional district’ and ‘greater boards’ that deliver regional services, policy and political leadership on behalf of 23 members. North American cities once followed a density gradient where density decreased consistently with increasing distance from the city center. Suburbanization has flattened the density gradient as more and more people have moved out of the city center and suburbs have become uniformly dense. The U.S. and Canadian suburbs are characterized by sprawl, which is a progressive spread of development over the landscape. The U.S. and Canadian suburbs sprawl across the landscape because of a desire for single-family housing surrounded by private land. European cities restrict the availability of land for new development to preserve the greenbelts, which are rings of open green space surrounding cities.

Zoning ordinances in the early decades of the twentieth century encouraged spatial segregation. They prevented the mixing of land uses within the same district. Single-family houses, apartments, industry, and commerce were kept apart because the location of one activity near another was considered unhealthy and inefficient. Legal devices, such as requiring each house to sit on a large lot and the prohibition of apartments, prevent low-income families from living in many suburbs. The suburbs created segregated land uses, with residential areas separate from retail and manufacturing activities, with the consequence of requiring automobile ownership for all trips. Retailing has been increasingly concentrated in planned suburban shopping malls. Suburbanization is made possible by high levels of automobile ownership and now requires most U.S. and Canadian residents to drive daily to work and other trips. Population growth has led to traffic congestion and inefficient use of land for roads and parking. An average city allocates about one-fourth of its land to roads and parking lots. 

Try to understand urban areas, census metropolitan areas, annexation, sub-urbanization, sprawl, smart growth and transportation into and out of city cores. From the Conversation Boomburbs: The rapid rise of Toronto’s northern suburbs










Geography family if you are interested, UBC Geography is one of the top geography departments in the world...the 2023 QS World University Rankings by Subject rank UBC Geography as the number 7 school in the entire world (and number 2 in North America behind only UCal Berkeley and just ahead of UCLA). These rankings are based upon academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact. The UBC  undergraduate program is divided into three fields: B.A. in Human Geography, B.A. in Environment and Sustainability, and B.Sc. in Geographical Sciences. UVIC, SFU, VIU, UNBC, UFV and TRU offer both a B.A. and a B.Sc. in Geography while KPU offers a B.A. and BCIT offers a GIS training program while NIC offers some geography courses (GEO-112 Intro Human Geography at NIC is basically the Human Geography class at Vanier). 

Don't forget that: 

Enjoy and remember that Geography Rules.

C/D Blocks Social and Environmental Sciences - We're at the "where do we go from here?" spot in the class. Let's start with these two videos:



Any idea how these two videos are connected? They both kind of address the concept of a liminal space. The liminal space is the threshold--the moment of becoming, the moment of intersection, the moment of occupying two spaces at the same time. From A Space to Inspire
The liminal space can be seen as a transformative space. It occurs when things such as our thoughts, knowledge or ideas are in some way challenged, when our understanding of something is unsettled rendering it fluid. That space of in-between is a state of liminality, a transition in the learning process, the crossing of a threshold. From here we begin to reconfigure our prior understandings, perspectives and conceptual schema.We let go of the conceptual stance we had.
What Is A Liminal Space?
Why Feeling Uncomfortable Is The Key To Success
The Educational Power of Discomfort

Time to get a bit nerdy here. Megan Boler is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto) and wrote a book titled Feeling Power Emotions and Education. In the book, Boler introduces a "pedagogy of discomfort" where she indicates that living with ambiguity is discomforting, however it is necessary for people to become aware how they see the world and also to change it...In essence, attending to our feelings of discomfort is a key component of the struggle for social change (196). This is an example of a liminal space.

In this class Benton and I have asked you to “bear witness” to ambiguities, contradictions, and internal struggles associated with environmental injustices, and have asked you to articulate the causes of and possible alternatives for them. We have tried to break you from a binary mindset of us vs them: 
  • environmental vs economic
  • Indigenous vs Western
  • holistic vs linear
  • quantitative vs qualitative
  • circular vs pyramidal
  • slow vs fast
  • right vs wrong
  • good vs bad
We've done this so that you can move away from the self imposed isolation of sticking your head in the sand (the passive numbness of survival) and move toward true empathy and action. That's what your final assignment is about. On to the learning commons/library! Benton and I will have a check in with you to show us the research you've done and if you need it, we will need you to develop a plan (road map) for your inquiry. What do you need to do? How do you plan to go about doing it? When do you plan on getting it done?  Don't forget this is an active research project and we expect you'll need to go out into the community to interview people and work with environmental groups/organizations, so who do you need to talk to and when will you talk with them? Benton and I will conduct an interview with you structured around a W5H approach (who, what, when, where, why, how). Remember you're looking at groups who are trying to solve an environmental issue. Consider the following questions:

1. Which do you think is the best way to address this issue in your community, community action or public policy
2. What are the advantages of this solution? What are the disadvantages? You will need to be able to address the disadvantages, as well.
3. List some influential individuals or groups who might be willing to support your proposal.
4. How might you be able to win the support of some of these individuals or groups?

If you are missing work (check MyEdBC) please submit it to us. 

If you are interested in environmental careers, check out the training possibilities here on Vancouver Island...

This Week's Fit..




  

 



Posted by Geo Teacher at 7:56 PM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)