Urban Issues

Week 4: Urban Issues

How do you sustain quality of life in a city when success has often been equated with eventually leaving the city behind for greener pastures—or at least a new house in the suburbs? This trend could contradict the notion that quality of life exists in a city, or is worth sustaining when it seems many people would rather leave the city.

However, while your image of the city may be one of traffic-clogged streets, you may find just as many traffic jams in the wide lanes leading to a subdivision or shopping center. This conception of quality of life as being out of the city, rather than in the city, offers opportunities for some, but it also triggers urban and suburban problems that affect a wide range of people. Because problems related to suburban growth are created by and affect many sectors of society and disciplines, learning more about these relationships is well suited to an interdisciplinary approach.

Last week, you considered some of the reasons why humans settle where they do. This week, you’ll use an interdisciplinary approach to examine why humans choose to move from the city to the suburbs and the impact of that movement.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

Compare how urban issue-related choices affect quality of life for citizens

Develop an Annotated Bibliography

A City Museum: Site Selection Research and Annotated Bibliography

This week you will select a site for your museum out of the three options offered below. Each scenario presents a specific problem. You then need to justify your choice for the scenario you chose, explaining how you plan to address the problem presented in the scenario.

For Final Project Milestone 3, you must:

Decide on one of the three given sites for your museum

Conduct research to find at least two articles that support and justify your choice of museum site.

Download the “Week 4 Annotated Bibliography: Museum Site Research” worksheet found in this week’s Learning Resources area.

Fill out the worksheet indicating which site you have chosen and how each of the articles you have found supports your choice. This worksheet will grow bigger as you write to accommodate your answers, so no additional paper needs to be written to address these questions.

Required ReadingsTHIS SOME READING MATERIALS TO HELP

Note: To access this week’s required library resources, please click on the link to the Course Readings List, found in the Course Materials section of your Syllabus.

Branson, A. (2008, March 14). The art of urban renewal. Regeneration & Renewal, 11.

In this article, Branson reports on the success of Design for London, an urban regeneration project.

Clarke, R. J. (2004, March). Bowling together. OECD Observer, 242, 14–15.

This is an interview of Robert Putnam, Harvard Professor of Public Policy, and author of the book Bowling Alone, which focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of social capital.

Mitchell, J. G. (2001). Urban sprawl. National Geographic, 200(1), 48–74.