Contrast of Wealth Disparity on a Global Scale

The title I chose for this blog entry probably isn't the best for what I intend to talk about.  We have discussed poverty against wealth in cities and how they work with and against one another.  However these concepts apply mainly to western society, particularly the United States.

In other places this type of contrast is far greater.  One great example of this would be Dubai.  Dubai is a place loaded with oil money.  However oil supplies in Dubai are limited so a little over a decade ago, city planners and the government decided to invest their oil money in massive city development to continue the growth and economic development after the oil runs out.

This rapid development requires a very large workforce however, and Dubai and the UAE have received a great deal of criticism in recent years about how they acquire this workforce.  It is mainly comprised of migrant workers from countries such as Bangladesh and India.  These migrant workers are brought over thinking they can earn a decent living to send home to their families.  The reality however is far from ideal.  The workers live in camps, far detached from the glamourous city that we see in pictures.  They work 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week, and are paid nowhere near what they were promised.  Furthermore the living conditions of the camps are generally substandard.  The government has rules against this but is not very strict about enforcing them.

This is an extreme contrast against the way people live in the city, which is practically built from gold.  As far as I know Dubai is the only place in the world which builds islands in the shape of palms, and continues to build resort after resort after resort.  It also has some of the most expensive property in the world, for which the value only continues to rise.  Granted there are exceptions to everything, but it is difficult to imagine this type of extreme contrast of wealth, living conditions, etc.  Reading this particular article, one would almost believe a homeless resident of an american subway station has it better off than these migrant workers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm

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.”

Legible Cities

http://upm.academia.edu/sourenaziaei/Papers/641508/Legible_cities_The_role_of_visual_clues_and_pathway_configuration_in_legibility_of

This class this past week we have been discussing the structure of a city and its role in cinema. That a city is a problem of organized complexity, neither a simple relationship between ratios and statistics nor a completely random system but something based on more complicated relationships. In answering what problem a city represents we delved into the components of the problem, first noting that cities can be read and therefore have legibility. The elements of cleanliness and architectural design, population and liveliness allow those living in a city to find their way in it and know what areas to avoid or seek out. The legibility is made of many parts, the paths used for travel, the districts that define the structure of the city and edges that mark boundaries between them, the nodes that form around path crossings and social hangout spots, and the landmarks that guide people on the paths through nodes. We finished the week discussing how the city environment is perceived both in media, such as movies, and by people that are unused to it. How a city is thought of as a scary and uninviting place by those that live in the country and vice versa.

                In this article it discusses how city legibility can be measured and improved depending on how regular or irregular of the paths and landmarks of a city are. In specific the article focus on a study conducted between three cities. In order of decreasing regularity they are: Saltaire, Sheffield, and Runcorn. It was found that local Englishmen could navigate and remember the cities with the most amount of regularity the best. The resulting map cross reference between all study participants was known as the group image. The group image was most accurate and contained the most information in Saltaire, due to its high amount of regularity. The study went on use group density of movement, pathway configuration and the location of significant spatial elements to track the social aspects of the city and related them to the maps of the study participants. Unsurprisingly it found that city elements that were highly used regular showed up far more regularly in the group image. These elements were calculated as intelligible, it was found that Saltaire was the most intelligible while Runcorn was the lowest. It was further found that physical visibility is not linked to the importance of spatial element in group images.

What Defines A City?

http://www.putitintowords.co.uk/property/what-defines-a-village-town-or-city/

In class this past week we have been attempting to define what exactly makes up a city. What words do you use to describe it? What picture represents a city to you? These questions help us to understand the ultimate question "What is a city?"After all, the idea of what defines a city is socially constructed. While maybe this a question that has an ambiguous answer there are certain landmarks, locations, and numerous other factors that determine a city. The above article discusses qualifications for city status in the United Kingdom.

In this article, a distinction is made between villages, towns, and cities. It relies on five key elements: churches, town halls, infrastructure, population density, and geographical location. Cities according to this article represent a highly industrialized area with an even higher population density. They have bustling urban centers that may have important significance or governance. After cities the second largest are towns and then villages. A village must have a church to be recognized. In the United States things are similar. It seems we tend to categorize things more along the lines of rural, suburban, and urban and our cities share the same characteristics of industrialization and high population density.