SETTLEMENT LESSON PLANS

This page archived August 2008

1. House details: ORIGAMI

There is a simple sequence of Origami folds which allow you to create the frontage of a semi-detached house. This could then be labelled up with the relevant detail on materials, construction details relating to period it was built etc. The details were printed in the TES Teacher magazine on January 10th 2003, which some of you will have access to. This is something that we also use with Year 7 pupils where a Geography department competition is run to discover the best sketches of a house, which has to be labelled with some of the features which help to determine the age of the property. Or take a digital camera picture and label it in Powerpoint or Word, and animate the labels. Go for it!

2. Changing Urban Sizes

One of the major changes in the size of cities has been that LEDCs have begun to overtake MEDCs as having the largest cities.

There are other dates which can also be obtained from sources like David Waugh's 'The Wider World' and similar texts. This can be revealed slowly as in the Top 10 in the 'hit parade' with some suitably cheesy lines like "a new entry at number 8 - it's Beijing!"  I would now also change this to use a series of IMAGES of the cities, to see if students can identify them from visual clues.

3. CASE STUDY AREAS

Most GCSE syllabuses will cover this issue, and there are several obvious areas which can be used as exemplars.

London Docklands

Sheffield - Don Valley - one I use in particular due to my local knowledge of the area - I was born in Rotherham, and spent a lot of time in Sheffield, just don't mention the Wapentake or Roxy's....

Some materials on this area will appear when I have the time to get them onto the website - promise !

There's a virtual tour of Liverpool HERE. The organisation LIVERPOOL VISION is masterminding the redevelopment of areas of the city.

4. Pedestrianisation.

This can create controversy when it is first suggested as some retailers have different views about the benefits of the schemes. When it was introduced in Chester in 1995 there were mixed views, but it has helped preserve the centre of the city with its medieval 'rows' or raised covered shopping arcades.

Chester city centre. Photograph by Mister P

PROS AND CONS OF PEDESTRIANISATION

Put these onto foot outlines and decorate the wall with them. (Can also be done for the theme of migration) FEET OUTLINES can be produced from various templates and sources.

5. CITY STATISTICS

Need some statistics on Cities in Europe ? Need to have information on cities such as Berlin, London, Vienna, Copenhagen, Madrid or Marseilles ? Need statistics on Income, Households, Culture, Energy Use, Environment, Health and Crime. Then go to this EUROPA site. It's rather good...

For all you could ever want to know about LONDON, go to the RADLEY COLLEGE site which is full of statistics and useful diagrams. They refer to the LONDON INITIATIVE.

6. BUILDINGS - dating houses

One of the tasks that we do is to try to identify the age of houses, and locate them within the town. We would expect the houses nearer to the centre of the town to be older than those on the estates around the edge. Along the main roads out of the town, for example London Road in King's Lynn, we would also expect some older properties built at a time when the road was important as an entry point into the town.

The NORTHERN GRID for Learning has a useful page produced by Jonathan Lane, which gives digital images of different types of housing. There are images of different types of buildings and different ages.

The age of properties can be ascertained by looking at a range of features which are clues as to the likely age: Georgian, Victorian and Post War houses all have distinctive features and usage of building materials.

These include:

- roof materials: slate rather then tiles

- stone

- bricks - decorative features around windows and doors

- storm porches

- garages attached

- size of front garden

- terraced housing

- number of floors

- size of windows and shape of windows - proportions

We use a series of house type recording sheets - I remember doing an activity like this on a fieldtrip about 30 years ago !

7. To do a useful comparison between houses in different areas of the country you can now use one of the Online estate agents, who have pictures and prices of houses in different areas. Try the names of your local estate agents, or use one of the national chains. I keep copies of the Property pages in the local paper to keep track of changes in prices and have an exercise involving moving house, which links to a role play and the movement of the Jarvis family. You can also look at how properties within the same town vary. There are other online estate agents too...have a go at finding them - I'll list some more here soon if I get a new job and need to look for a job in, let's say, York....

8. Have a go at Mark Rossen's excellent GEOSENSE game. It's an ONLINE game which involves you in placing a city on a world map as quickly and accurately as you can. It's FREE!

9. Take Peter Collinson's TOUR OF CANTERBURY. It's a VIRTUAL TOUR and rather good.

10. TRAFFIC: the increasing amount of traffic on the roads in cities, due to the increasing car ownership is a growing problem in cities.

Here are some methods of reducing traffic. Try to separate these out into either CARROT or STICK approaches.

11. RETAILING: OUT OF TOWN SHOPPING CENTRES

The David Gardiner resource "ICT Activities in Geography" has some Powerpoint presentations on Monk's Cross and Meadowhall, and images of other shopping areas too. There are some useful resources on the Internet which a few searches will uncover.

• There's a separate page of information on MEADOWHALL here. Thanks to the EDUSCHOOL programme for this information, as credited on the actual webpage.

• Some SHOPPING information too.

• Put together a POWERPOINT presentation which includes some of the features of the program: photograph labelling and annotation, linking maps and photos, animation and slide transitions. Each slide should be on one aspect of the SHOPPING CENTRE:

LOCATION

MAP with ANNOTATIONS

IMAGES

STATISTICS

for example, the Trafford Centre has 1.4 million square feet of retail space, with over 250 shops. There are thousands of free car parking spaces, and restaurants and cinemas.

ADVANTAGES OF ITS LOCATION

12. DUBAI

This is the biggest building site in the world at the moment. Not only is there large scale development in the cities, but also the reclamation of land.

There are 2 remarkable developments: "The Palm" and "The World" which are man-made islands.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4506512.stm has a perspective on the changes that are taking place.

14. HIERARCHY MOBILE

This is a nice idea from Tony Cassidy: take images of places of different sizes: London, cities, villages, countryside etc., and then construct a mobile with string and wire, with the lower levels of the hierarchy hanging lower than the city.

90% of population in Netherlands lives in urban populations - higher even than the UK

Nearly half live in Randstad: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague - urban sprawl has joined them up and removed the green belt land in between.

FoE are campaigning to save the 'Green heart' which is in the middle of the Randstad: ring shaped conurbation.

Why are these areas important ? (for people and for wildlife)

Visit to Leidsche Rijn - New Town with 30 000 homes being built on local farmland - Joop & Nel  Uiterwaal lost their family farm

Talk to Carrot family who moved to the New Town from the city of Utrecht - why did they move ? - council are also redeveloping the inner city

Dutch government is trying to use land as close to cities as possible

Waste disposal is another issue: recycling has been used for many years - visit to landfill site, and household waste / chemical waste dumped  - these will be sealed up - visit to waste incineration plant - gases are filtered and removed - energy used to run the trams in Amsterdam as well as 100 000 homes and many public buildings

Comparison with Scotland - Netherlands only landfilled 15% compared to 94% in Scotland

Traffic Pollution: Amsterdam has 600 000 bikes - cars still produce half the city's air pollution

16. HOUSING ESTATES

Just finished this, and has some rather good detail which I will develop further soon. Also check out the PILOT blog as there are more housing resources there too...

Link through to these other HOUSING RESOURCES

Building for Life	Inside Housing
CABE An organisation with links to the GA	Hemingway Design

Wayne Hemingway's design company is involved in the redesign of several areas, except that as Lynsey Hanley says in her book, there is a whole new vocabulary built up around such schemes. Hemingway Design mention the terms

Re-vision

Re-evaluate

Re-masterplan

They are involved in schemes from London to Lancashire...

Include the Staiths on the Southbank - check out the VIRTUAL TOUR via the HEMINGWAY DESIGN website. I also like where it says "A Few Words - suitable for students" so he appreciates the value of these projects as resources for geographers and students of other disciplines. Will be using these resources with students.

17. THE HYTHE CHALLENGE

This is a rediscovery while I was looking for a DVD for someone else in my cupboard I came across a CD and spiral bound resources for

The Hythe Challenge: A Sustainable challenge for the future

Produced by teachers in the East of England working with planners.

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