Tuesday, January 16. 2018

Today's schedule is C-D-A-B

C Block Human Geography 11 - Today we'll look at the Key Issue, "Why Do Services Cluster Downtown"? 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 central business district (CBD) is the core of the city where many services cluster. Public, Business and Commercial services are attracted to the CBD because of its accessibility and density. We'll examine North American and non North American downtown cores.



Questions for the day include:
Using your knowledge of services from chapter 12 (last week's work), define each term and give an example of a typical downtown shop with that characteristic.
1. High Threshold
2. High Range
3. Why are these shops decreasing in the CBD?
4. Regarding residential uses – identify a factor pushing them out of the CBD and another that is pulling them elsewhere.
5. Describe how the intense land use of CBDs has created expansion of the CBD “above” and “below” in order to maximize the small space of the downtown?

D Block Criminology 12 - This week we'll take a look at crime waves, moral panics and the media with a special focus today on age (specifically youth). We’ll look at the way the media turns “ordinary” criminal events into extraordinary criminal “panics”. This happens when the Mass Media (usually led by the press) defines a group or an act as deviant and focuses on it to the exclusion of almost anything else. This then focuses the public’s negative attention on the group or act and demonizes people associated with it. When it comes to crime, young people are often lumped into one of two contradictory categories: Tragic Victims or Evil Monsters. We'll try to make sense of how the media covers youth criminals and victims using the 2012 murder of Syklar Neese...


B Block Physical Geography 12 - Today we look at the ethics associated with resource use focusing on the four ethical views on resource use (economic/exploitation; preservationist; balanced-multiple use; and ecological or sustainable).
 

We'll talk about over-consumption and unsustainable resource use practices using the example of water consumption and the Aral Sea. From National Geographic:

Actually a freshwater lake, the Aral Sea once had a surface area of 26,000 square miles (67,300 square kilometers). It had long been ringed with prosperous towns and supported a lucrative muskrat pelt industry and thriving fishery, providing 40,000 jobs and supplying the Soviet Union with a sixth of its fish catch...The Aral Sea was fed by two of Central Asia's mightiest rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. But in the 1960s, Soviet engineers decided to make the vast steppes bloom. They built an enormous irrigation network, including 20,000 miles of canals, 45 dams, and more than 80 reservoirs, all to irrigate sprawling fields of cotton and wheat in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In the decades that followed, the Aral Sea was reduced to a handful of small lakes, with a combined volume that was one-tenth the original lake's size and that had much higher salinity, due to all the evaporation. As a result of the drying over the past decades, millions of fish died, coastlines receded miles from towns, and those few people who remained were plagued by dust storms that contained the toxic residue of industrial agriculture and weapons testing in the area.


For the Aral Sea please check out the following:
Aral Sea Foundation
National Geographic News Aral Sea
NASA World of Change Aral Sea
The Aral Sea Crisis at Columbia University

We'll end the class finishing the Human Footprint DVD that we began yesterday with a seemingly simple question...."How Much do You Consume?"

I need you to continue tracking your family's water consumption for the week and you can use the water footprint calculator at the H20 Conserve website. For more on water as a resource please check out:
Ministry of Environment: Water for British Columbia
United Nations: Water Topics
Encyclopedia of Earth: Water

And from TIME...After three years of unprecedented drought, the South African city of Cape Town has less than 90 days worth of water in its reservoirs, putting it on track to be the first major city in the world to run out of water. Read the article Cape Town Is 90 Days Away From Running Out of Water