Concentric Zone Theory

One of the geographical characteristics of cities is the proportion of low-lying areas that exists. Studies have been carried out to examine residential segregation. The theory that was being studied was whether

This theory is often referred to as a Concentric Zone Theory.# Burgess believed that as cities expand in size, the development is patterned socially and argued that the city of Chicago could be described in terms of five concentric zones. It was by a competitive process that decided how people were distributed spatially amongst the zones.# The most expensive residential areas were in the outer zones, away from the chaotic atmosphere in the city centre, the pollution caused by factories and the homes of the poor. However, Burgess placed great importance on the ‘zone of transition '. The zone of transition was an area of great social upheaval, which contained deteriorating tenements, often built in the shadow of ageing factories. This zone was described as the least desirable living area and was the focus for the influx of waves of immigrants, as this was the only place the immigrants could afford to reside. This lead to weak family and communal ties which resulted in ‘social disorganisation and it was this disorganisation that was presented as the primary explanation of criminal behaviour.#

Task #1 : Analyse the impacts of at least two urban dynamics operating in a large city of the developed world.

Urban sprawl was a major problem and had many negative effects. "Suburban sprawl, “called urban sprawl was a result of overpopulation. Sprawl occurred when cities spread outward. Forests and farmland were being destroyed to create new housing subdivisions, shopping centers, offices, parking areas, civic institutions and roadways. State governments built highways and roads to serve all the new commuters moving in and out of the city. Developers chose to build on less expensive land farther away from the urban core. Land prices were lower and housing in these developments was more affordable. Some people chose a longer commute in exchange for more comfortable, low-priced housing. The sprawl was a chronological process that devastated the land and life of the American people. This problem described here continues to be a problem. And many people are unaware that urban sprawl continues to be a problem. Friendly neighborhoods, traditional pedestrian have fallen victim to this problem. Environmental activists claimed that urban sprawl, was a substantial environmental threat. But activists concerned about sprawl should concentrate on existing government policies that encourage suburban development and prevent greater redevelopment of urban areas.

“gentrification has been and still continues to be a critical task when it comes to urban geography of cities, such as New York City and cities around the world as well” (Smith, pg.129).

This paper is a review of past and current research based on the cause and effect of urban sprawl in the United States with a case analysis of Fairfax County, Virginia. The motivation for this review is to shed light on issues that surround urban sprawl in large metropolitan areas and to discuss recommendations for research and ways to improve various effects of sprawl. The second motivation for this research is to show that there needs to be uniformity among researchers and urban planners, better data and analysis should be done to combat sprawl. My goal with this literature review is to define urban sprawl, define classic patterns in the United States, how we measure sprawl, the cause and effect of sprawl in the United States, give detailed background information on Fairfax County, future trends and implications of sprawl in Fairfax County, how to combat sprawl in the United States as well as in Fairfax County and key priorities in future research.

The concentric-zone model, starts with a city in the middle and as you move outward in the different rings the space becomes more expensive and it is less dense. The idea is that the city grows outward from a central area in a series of rings. The upper classes live farther away from the city because they can afford the commute, while the lower classes lived much closer to the city. This model can be found in indianapolis.There are challenges with this model because it doesn’t show the advancement in transportation, cities are no longer organized with zones/layers. The concentric model and my model are polar opposites, therefore in the long term our models would never work but in the short term they would because they have some

The metropolitan growth from the 1920s to 1960s is linked to changes in the nature of US capitalism through monopoly capitalism and competitive capitalism. Competitive capitalism is more so how goods or merchandise is encouraged to be a source of a profit, whereas monopoly capitalism is more so how much profit can be traded at a vast amount to a certain amount of people. From the 1920s to the 1960s the metropolitan period brought forth city and government expansion, as well as combining smaller cities into larger cities making way for suburbanization (Mark Gottdiener R. H., 2015). There are two processes that play a part in regional growth, which are: greater differentiation of the system of cities, expressed as changes in spatial, functional,

First of all, the planning ideas that guided the process of urban redevelopment in different countries vary to a significant extent. In Japan, priority was given to improve the urban road network. As a consequence, broad arterial roads were planned, and green areas were provided at the fringe. The redevelopment of the city of Nagoya revealed ambitious efforts. In this city, two 100-meter wide boulevards that served as the axes was constructed, and a large number of parks were established. While according to the Tokyo plan, an extensive network of ring and radial parkways, greenbelts, and corridors were built in order to restructure Tokyo and subdivide it into many smaller sub-cities. On the outskirts, a permanent greenbelt would be formed where development would be constrained. Additionally, most of the population were

The ambiguous nature of the term “planning”, as it relates to land use, is historically tied to the practice of zoning. Zoning in the US came about in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to protect the interests of property owners. The practice was found to be constitutionally sound by the Supreme Court decision of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co.in 1926. Soon after, the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act gave authority to the states to regulate land use. Even so, the practice remains controversial today. The figure below shows the timeline of the evolution of land use planning which has undergone a paradigm shift from being focused to economics to a more holistic one, which now covers economy, environment and socio- economic. Each

Aforementioned the main research objective is to demonstrate that urban sprawl policies are more prominent in metropolitan cities with a lesser emphasis on secondary cities, as well as to determine comprehendible definitions of urban and rural areas within policies. Although substantial research is available, again the problems emerge as secondary cities apparently do not receive any focus. In the literature section of this research study, the scoping review methods were used, these types of reviews provide a preliminary assessment of the potential size and scope of available research literature. It aims to identify the nature and extent of research evidence (usually including on-going research).

Following contains the model that was first brought to use by Harris and Ullman in 1945, their hypothesis was that there are a series of nuclei of patterns that develop as the demand is there. However, it was clear that modern cities did not fit in the mould of the sector and the concentric model; they are developing at a rate that could not be predicted. Parts of the suburbs are developing to function as smaller business districts. These smaller business districts acted as nodes/nuclei that different land use patterns are being formed.

This drawback was addressed by emergence of polycentric and zonal land use models in the late 1930s and 1940s (Rodrigue, 2015). A model proposed by Hoyt (1939), based on a study of residential areas of North America, stated that land use pattern and growth were not sharply defined as concentric circles but rather were sectors within a circle and major transportation corridors were responsible for defining these sectors (Rodrigue, 2015). Harris and Ullman (1945) proposed a model which also stated that cities do not grow around central business district but rather develop as nodes that differentiate and are further specialized based on factors such as accessibility, proximity interactions with other similar or different areas, as well as location suitability based on price, rent and so on (Rodrigue, 2015). Following these concepts of land use and urban growth, hybrid models, such as that of Isard (1955), were developed in the latter half of the 1950. These models amalgamated the behaviors of various concentric, sector, and nuclei models into one model to explain land use change and urban growth (Rodrigue, 2015). The limitations of these traditional models have been their static and linear nature, which made it difficult for these models to encompass and generate certain parameters such as complex surface features, as well as their focus on mostly large geographic units such as administrative regions, that provided insufficient spatial information for setting up detailed land use and growth models (Qi,

Metropolitan areas exhibit an amazing diversity of features, economic structures, amounts of infrastructure, historic roots, patterns of development, and degrees of conventional planning. Yet, lots of the problems that they deal with are strikingly acquainted. For example, as metropolitan areas grow, they grow to be increasingly diverse.

An emerging issue is that of urban sprawl. While some aspects of urban sprawl has been seen since ancient times, this phenomenon has started gaining the most momentum in the past century, aided by the advancement of technology, especially with the rise of mass produced automobiles, houses and highway systems. Many people unknowingly contribute to this environmental problem, as is the nature of it. Urban sprawl deals with the growth of the suburbs, the area between the urban and rural areas of a city. Most of America’s largest cities and states, in terms of population, are prime examples of urban sprawl. Opponents of urban sprawl usually cite the government as a major cause of sprawl. The government may be a major catalyst of