PDS APES 5th Period 2009-10

*Note: This is a guest post from John O. in the other class.  Not a lot of this on the exam, but a good recap of urban planning challenges:

Today we had a guest speaker in class, Garet Johnson from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg planning department. She spoke to us about urban planning and how it relates to our area.

Why do we need urban planning?

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg area has been growing pretty rapidly over the past few decades. It’s still undergoing considerable development, and the population is expected to continue to grow. So the city needs planners to help direct and manage this growth in a responsible way. Essentially, they act as policy advisors, helping City Council to make good, informed decisions while trying to handle this growth.

How does planning work in Charlotte?

As I mentioned earlier, the overall goal of urban planning is to figure out how best to deal with the growth of our city. We want to make sure that the city of Charlotte is a nice place to live in the future, so we have to guide how the city grows. This is accomplished through:

• Planning specific areas- Determining what is needed where and when it will be needed. What areas need homes? What areas need shopping? Where do we need schools? Parks? Where can we put industrial areas?The end result is a detailed guide to the development or re-development needed in certain areas. This is the part that planners do, and later on in class, we tried to do it.
• Zoning- Determining where certain kinds of things can go. The city doesn’t want industrial plants next-door to people’s houses, so it places restrictions on what can be built where. Since this is a legislative process, it’s the territory of City Council.

Centers, corridors, and wedges

The "Centers, Corridors, and Wedges" map

What is Charlotte’s overall plan? It’s more or less outlined in the handout called “Centers, Corridors, and Wedges” that we were given this week in class. It is the “growth framework” for the city.

• “Centers”- These are the hubs of activity in Charlotte. Places like Southpark or the Arboretum that are concentrated areas of industry or of commerce and entertainment.
• “Corridors”- These are the areas of Charlotte where the most growth is taking place. There are five of them, in a spoke-like pattern. They extend along major roads like I-77, I-85, and Independence.
• “Wedges”- These are primarily residential areas. On a map, they look like wedges between the corridors.

Some of the primary goals of the plan are:

• Connecting these different areas with mass transit like buses or light rail, and retrofitting the established automobile-centered system of roads to meet this goal
• Creating a better blend of these areas, and providing enough park space in all of them
• Encouraging “mixed-use” centers to cut down on the need for travel
• Building up, not out

Trying out some urban planning on a map.

Class Activity

Later in class, we broke into groups to try urban planning a bit for ourselves. We were given maps of the county and color-coded areas according to what we though should go there. The general class trend was creating mixed-use centers with residential, commercial, and entertainment areas all intermixed.

Links

Webpage for the city’s planning department: http://www.charmeck.org/Departments/Planning/Home.htm

“Centers, Corridors, and Wedges” http://ww.charmeck.org/Planning/Land%20Use%20Planning/CentersCorridorsWedges/CentersCorridorsWedges(GrowthFramework_Draft).pdf

*A bit late, but a good guest post by Ian N. from the other class.*

There are two “Human Population Problems” that we discussed in class on Friday:

1. The Annual Growth Rate (AGR) of a population is too high, leading to problems with overpopulation.
2. The AGR of a population is too low, leading to problems involving a “graying,” or aging overall population.

Big Picture: How to responsibly address an AGR that is too high.

There are 3 primary methods to addressing an Annual Growth Rate that is too high:

1. Family Planning: This doesn’t just include things like the government handing out condoms. Governments can fight high population growth by promoting sex-ed courses that help people in the community learn how to practice safe sex and avoid unwanted pregnancies. A good example of this method being used would be Thailand, where family planning programs helped to reduce the AGR from 3.2% in 1971 to 1.6% in 1986.
2. Industrialization: Most high AGRs come hand-in-hand with poverty. The poorer a nation’s population is, the less likely it is that the people in the population will use birth control or other means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. By industrializing, a nation increases its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which in turn allows its population to raise its standard of living by making more money. As a population increases its standard of living, it will begin to be more cautious when it comes to sexual practices, causing its AGR to go down. Many Asian countries helped to reduce their AGR by industrializing and increasing their GDP.
3. Improve Education and Opportunities for Women: One of the biggest causes of a high AGR is the inability of the women in a population to have a say over how many children they have. In these societies, the men essentially decide how many children a woman will have, and a large amount of children (especially sons) is often seen as a positive thing. If women in these societies were to be given greater opportunities, they would be able to get better educations, become working members of society, and get a much greater say in the number of children that they bear. By empowering women, a nation is able to greatly reduce its population’s AGR.

What Can One Nation Do to Regulate Its AGR?

A nation can use policies, laws, regulations, and taxes to help control the growth of its population.

• China cut its Crude Birth Rate (CBR) in half by implementing its One Child Policy in 1972. This is one of the strictest programs in the world. The government gives a ton of incentives such as extra food, larger pensions, better housing, free medical expenses, free school tuition, and salary bonuses to parents who follow the One Child Policy. After the couple has had one child (or two children in select cases), either the woman is required to wear an intrauterine device that greatly reduces the chance of pregnancy or one of them is required to be sterilized. If a couple chooses not to follow the policy, they are faced with a series of penalties, including fines, loss of land grants, and even discharge from the Chinese Communist Party.
• Countries such as the US use tax deductions and tax credits to control AGR. In short, if AGR is too low, the government can offer to reduce people’s taxes if they have more children, and if AGR is too high, the government can offer to reduce people’s taxes if they get sterilized . Tax deductions are expenses you are allowed to use to reduce your gross income that affects how much you are taxes, while tax credits are amounts subtracted directly from the amount of tax you already owe.
• Governments can also use rebates to control a population’s AGR. Rebates are direct payments from the government to you, and can be given in exchange for a couple either having more children or having less children. You are probably most familiar with the rebates that are offered to you after you buy something in a store.

I think I asked this in class and either didn’t get an answer or didn’t listen to the answer. Why would a pull to a city be for the environmental advantages? Doesn’t a city just bulldoze over the environment to build skyscrapers and strip malls?

While going over my study guide and reading back through the book i realized I am not 100% sure what a demographic trap is.  The book says the trap occurs in stage 2 and that developing countries like Africa which is being ravaged by HIV/AIDS have had their death rate increase and could be falling back into stage 1.  So, does this mean that all countries that experience demographic trap fall back a stage (2->1)?  And are their other example countries anyone knows of that are victims (weird for this, I know)  of a demographic trap? Thanks.

Hi class mates. I have two questions, both of which should be relatively easy to answer. For some reason, I am having trouble understanding the #/1000 part of crude death and birth rates. Why do we do this again? and what are some typical numbers of CBR? Is it true to say that if these are equal then their is no pop growth (excluding emigration and immigration)? Also, what exactly would prevalent AIDS in a nation do to its pop. graph? I know these may seem simple, but I just want to make sure I have them right.

I’m about to check out and go to bed. Good luck. Just wanted to leave you all with this video that started this lesson. Wonder if we’ll see human population start to level out more in your lifetime? AGR has decreased a tiny bit over the last 50 years…

So, I was reading through the book and got to the section that talked about China’s population/population control.  It said that China’s fertility rate had decreased to 1.6 children per mother by 2007, but that the population wasn’t expected to level off until around 2050.  How does that happen? I thought that the replacement rate was 2.1, and if China is way under it, shouldn’t their population level off and start declining now?  Is it  just immigration?

When we were talking today about urban growth either growing up or out, is it fair to say that already developed areas or highly urbanized areas (New York) would grow up if they wanted to expand while those areas less urbanized would grow out first? I feel like I am generalizing this a bit too much because maybe it really does just depend on specific space and available resources (available land). It just seems like those skyscrapers just keep getting bigger and bigger when the newly urbanizing areas don’t seem to start out with large buildings like that from the first step…

I have one last easy question on my study guide that I couldn’t quite answer.  Number 8 asks why do we use crude birth and death rates instead of the total number?  I know that we use these numbers in our calculations for AGR and such.  Is it simply because they are “nicer” numbers to work with, or is there another reason why we use CDR and CBRs to evaluate population trends?

And if some one could answer Emily’s first question about why there is more growth in cities in developing countries than in developed countries because I was confused on that too.  My guess would be that more people are just swarming to urban areas seeking better health care, sanitation, family planning, education, etc. so their growth is much more rapid but I am not positive.

Okay so for number 22 on the study guide, one of the trends I wrote down from the book was “urban growth is much slower in developed countries than in developing countries.”  I understand why populations would increase more rapidly in developing countries, but I’m confused as to how urban growth is greater in developing countries because they don’t have the means and technology to be more urbanized, or at least that’s how I was looking at it.

Also, I don’t understand a demographic trap.  What exactly is it?