Urban Ecology and Land Rent Theory

     This week we discussed how people are distributed through out a city and the impacts of urban ecology. Urban Ecology is the attempt to study a city as though one were studying a forest ecosystem. The nutrients, water and sunlight of the forest become the people, traffic flow and funding of the city. Just as in a forest the effects of co dependence are the primary focus of study. The complex interaction of people, places and resources are observed and relationships found in order to better understand and plan for city life.
      Urban Ecology is essential to understanding how a city layout evolves over time. One theory that has been posed for city layout is the Land Rent Theory. According to this theory centers of cities are hubs of activity and as such have a high land value. As the centers of activity it benefits businesses of commerce more then that of industry or residential. As such commerce flocks to the center of a city, or sub centers such as a train station, and pay high rent values for the land. Further outside of the city center are businesses of industry, they want to stay near the center of activity but also near their employee's residences. Further out then industry is residential where the city's inhabitants live.
    In land rent theory it is often assumed that the more intensive the use of the land is the higher then rent will be as in a city. However as this article demonstrates: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu:8080/stable/pdfplus/1231379.pdf?acceptTC=true, that is not necessarily true. It is found that the cost of rent is a function of productivity, which is in turn a product of capacity and efficiency. Efficiency is the ratio of resources in to resources out that the land is capable of, be it natural resource collection, farming or urban development. Capacity is the ability of the land to produce useful resources. It is found that lightly used land can have large rent values and vica versa. Ultimately it is found that while the intensity of use of land is a good indicator of rent value they do not actually correlate.

Poverty and the Young Brain

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-12-07-childrens-brains_N.htm

     In this USA today article published in 2008 it discusses the link between Poverty and children's brain function. In class last week we discussed how poverty can be connected to other factors such as education, income, housing and so on. Indeed, we drew maps which showed the interconnectedness of all of these social factors. In our group we found that poverty affected all of these things and was the most pervasive factor in determining how people lived. Poverty is a state of being that dictates everything else in your life.
    The article goes even further by suggesting that poverty affects brain function in a way similar to that of a stroke. This means that problem solving and higher level thinking is affected negatively. This difference in the pre-frontal cortex is linked to the factors that result from poverty like stress, malnutrition, and toxic environments. Researchers have found that it is possible to reverse these effects on children's brains with intensive therapy and work. However, it is hard to break children of particular behaviors that are attached to their class. In short, in the United States, it is hard to rise above the class level from which you are born. This means that a child born into poverty will most likely grow old in poverty perpetuating the negative effects of poverty on crime and education.

Wealth Distribution in the US

The topic we have been discussing class this week is the UN state of cities.  One of the concepts I found to hit me the hardest was the idea of wealth disparity.  Its incredible how the as the net worth of a capita increases they belong to an increasingly smaller social class but control increasingly more assets.  It all makes perfect sense but it can still be a difficult concept to truly wrap one's head around.


At the bottom of this post is an article which puts some of this data as it applies to citizens of the United States into graphical form.  The interesting part from looking this over is how it shows what people want the distribution to be and what they think it is against the reality.  Its incredible how extreme the realities are and how inaccurately people perceive them.


http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Urban Tomography

In class this week we discussed about the topic “urban tomography”. The use of electronics has been used to capture special events, sports, concerts, or the normal flow of people. The devices that are used in urban tomography are cell phones, still images, GPS, audio recordings, etc. These are used to give many views of urban activity in cities. Urban tomography is more effective when you have a greater number of devices that are acquiring data from urban life.
http://www.metrans.org/research/2011/11-05.htm
A pilot program has been started in Los Angeles at a major transportation hub. They had this in effect for smartphones since January 2009. It has been placed there to help monitor threats and recording high quality video. With the improvement of technology with smartphones (Wifi, 3G), video content can be uploaded and tagged by the place and time the footage was captured. The article discussed the problem with possibly having thousands of video content of the same activities. The article said that a “display assistant” may need to be made to help find the videos that the want to view. The article stated that the benefits of tomography are the “improved, more efficient security at transportation hubs.”