John Meyer
Urban Sprawl: Feeding the World on Less Land
South Dakota State University
Dr. Agostini
Introduction Many people have heard or seen the commercials about how a farmer feeds 155 people in today’s world vs 28 people in years past (http://www.sdcorn.org). Farmers need to produce more food in the next 40 years than in the previous 10,000 years combined. According to the United Nations, 1 billion people across the globe suffer from chronic hunger today. This number is expected to dramatically increase as the world’s population grows to a projected 9 billion by 2050, requiring a 70 percent increase in the amount of food the world’s farmers produce annually (). The problem the world faces is how to feed the ever-growing population off of diminishing acres of farm land. It is urgent that the world comes together to form a plan to control the amount of land consumed by urban sprawl.
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Urban sprawl describes the physical expansion of low density urban areas into forest and agricultural environments. ( Pereira, Paulo, Algirdas Monkevičius, and Hanna Siarova, 2016) Urban sprawl is much like the name suggests, urban populations sprawling out over vast amounts of once productive farm ground. Unlike years past, much of today’s population resides in urban areas. This trend of rural populations moving towards more populated urban centers continues to grow extremely fast. To help curb this threat to our farmers there needs to be planning and coordination throughout the U.S. and the world as these urban centers swallow up more and more
Presently, 6.8 billion people exist on the Earth today. Combined, the entirety of farmland needed for these billions of people to be fed is equivalent to the size of South America. The population of Earth is still steadily increasing. Populations are expected to continue rising to 9.6 billion within the year 2050. Each one of these extra people also needing more healthy food, clean water, space, and energy to survive. When these extra bodies arrive, in addition to crop late the size of South America, an extra plot the size of Brazil will also be needed. This is not even including the land that every other creature on the planet needs to survive. When this is added to the calculation, eighty percent of dry land will need to be dedicated to
The news article I chose is titled Songbirds Divorce, Flee, and Fail to Reproduce Due to Suburban Sprawl written by Michelle Ma (2017). This news article is about one of the potential effects of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl is defined as the expansion of the human population away from the urban areas. Many people argue that sprawl has many negative effects on the environment such as taking agricultural lands and forests and turning them into an industrial warehouse that causes additional pollution. The negative effect on the environment in relation to this article is the displacement of wildlife that could lead to extinction.
In Robert Bruegmann article “How Sprawl Got a Bad Name,” he is the odd man out and is for sprawling. One of his reasons throughout is that all the architectures plan for preventing the problem has failed. Bruegmann shows his argument that the economy has these set of expectations for today’s society. The citizens are not really thinking realistically when it comes to those modern expectations. He backs up his point by stating a big crisis of traffic in Los Angeles and how it is not the congestion it is that the programs sit in place are outdated. One of the more convincing reasons of why Bruegmann is supporting sprawl is “that growing numbers of people have discovered that it is the surest way to obtain the rich, satisfying
Step one: I will refine and update the Ewing et al. (2002) metropolitan sprawl indices to 2010This study will differ from the Ewing et al.’s 2002study in three respects. First, it will include additional metrics from various data sources such as Walk Score, NAVTEQ road data, Smart Location Databases and National Land Cover Database in order to increase validity and captures more aspects of each four dimensions (development density, land use mix, activity centering and street accessibility).
The Southern California region, east of the city Los Angeles, is characterized by densely populated urban sprawl. This region, which is renowned for its daily traffic jams and sunny clime, offers little to no unoccupied, open and accessible land spaces for persons to freely shoot their legally owned fire arms. And, despite the now common mass shootings and emerging self-actuating Jihadists bent on creating fear and terror in western society. Many wholesome and conscientious local America citizens own guns; and desire to routinely shoot their guns for recreation and pleasure. This situation creates a lucrative business opportunity; for a firm willing to provide a meaningful and safe shooting range environment. There currently exist a select
Urban sprawl is a phenomenon in growing cities typified by continual growth of the urban area in a radial pattern, with the development of low density housing typically on agricultural or environmentally sensitive lands. Urban sprawl typically provides the quarter acre block or detached housing. However, this type of development tends to impact on food basins
A great number of Americans living today reside in areas where homes, businesses, and institutions are spread sparsely. These areas are commonly referred to as either urban or suburban sprawl. Sprawl is generally designed for the movement of cars and not the movement of pedestrians; most people simply will not, and often cannot, assume the role of pedestrian while navigating through sprawl. People are isolated from each other by the glass walls of cars and the metal gates of enclosed subdivisions. American culture glorifies the suburban lifestyle, but the drawbacks of this lifestyle affect not only those living within suburban sprawl itself, but also those living in the urban areas left behind as people mass-migrated to these sparsely concentrated areas. Despite the common perception that suburban, sprawling, and sparsely-concentrated urban life is overall better quality than urban life, the perpetual growth of urban and suburban sprawl in the United States has had negative environmental, physiological, and sociological effects on the land and population of the United States. Over the next twenty-five to fifty years, new suburban development and redevelopment should be based in design that is less sparsely-built, less car-dependent, less segregated by socioeconomic status, and less segregated by land use;
Gentrification is a general term for the arrival of wealthier people in an existing urban district, a related increase in rents and property values, and changes in the district’s character and culture. The word draws controversy not only in its definition and meaning but also in the impact it has among human social life. It is a practice that is of ancient origin and has withstood the challenges of evolving times and is still practiced in the contemporary world. Proposers and opponents alike of the gentrifying phenomena take advantage of the numerous myths and misconceptions that surround the practice to advance their arguments. Urban planners have rooted for the inclusion of gentrification as one of the pillars of urban growth. With better economic status- better roads, better water supply system, better healthcare, reduced criminal activities and an overall uplifting of the quality of life economically- it is hard to argue against an overall gain from gentrification. Yet with all this, it has been the source of a lot of widespread animosity between social classes. It has also been blamed for a lot of cultural values erosion with in some instances complete override of the indigenous ways of life that the original inhabitants subscribed to. Green development is an urban development approach that utilizes green infrastructural growth and is aimed at alleviating negative impacts, or ideally have a net positive impact, on the environment and nearby ecosystems.
In Feeding 9 Billion by the National Geographic magazine, the article proposes a 5 step solution to feed a growing population. The article first talks about the overall crisis that is going on and how we will have "to roughly double the number of crops we grow by 2050." National Geographic's five step plan is as follows: first, freeze agriculture's footprint, second, grow more on farms we've got, third, use resources more efficiently, forth, shift diets, and fifth, reduce waste. National
Urban Sprawl is an intricate concept that is mostly known as low density, automobile dependent development beyond the edge of employment and services zones. This type of development is ubiquitous in the United States since the end of World War II. Urban sprawl or suburban sprawl has raised immense number of concerns in various areas, such as: environmental impacts, loss of farmland, traffic problems, urban decline, taxpayer subsidy, loss of community, housing, as well as some unspecific concerns. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate in depth the major reasons that make urban sprawl exorbitant in the aforementioned areas.
What is beyond the financial cost for both the poor and the middle class is the social cost. The sprawl causes social decline. One of problem that authors address out is the difficulty of forming a community. Public space for social activity is the key, where people can interact with each other in an equal way. Unfortunately, this is what a sprawl fail to provide. Unlike traditional community which has a clear city/town center, sprawl doesn’t have these and many of them are still trying to create them. Even if some suburbia has a city center, the public area is usually not walkable, and people still rely on vehicle to get there. If a comfortable public zone is not created, the segregation based on race, ages, beliefs, would never go
Michael Johnson has written a paper that describes the research done to study the effects that urban sprawl has on public health. (Johnson 2001) "Urban sprawl has recently become a subject of popular debate and policy initiatives from governmental bodies and nonprofit organizations," Johnson states there are agreements towards the aspects that urban sprawl has on the environment, but we do need policy makers to decide and enforce an alternative so the conditions do not get worse and need to come up with new
Here is the deal, this world certainly isn’t getting any smaller. The population of the world as of right now is 7.5 BILLION people, That's a lot! By the year 2050, the government is predicting the population will be around 15 BILLION people. With this growing problem, farmers are feeling the pressure. But farmers have found a way to help this
Late into the month of October our class discussed the different forms of “sprawl”. The class learned discussed how urban sprawl is often seen as a bad thing because as business move right outside the city limit and begin to build. With these new developments comes possible job opportunities which in return attacks a variety of people. These people are now piling into a new city competing for new jobs , while all having lifestyles that benefit through different things all within the same city. With so many differenced problems tend to arise, and the original business only keep building, adding to the mess. With changes like these the whole community changes as well. Most small cities are not capable of handling extreme traffic, and over at
New Urbanism, a burgeoning genre of architecture and city planning, is a movement that has come about only in the past decade. This movement is a response to the proliferation of conventional suburban development (CSD), the most popular form of suburban expansion that has taken place since World War II. Wrote Robert Steuteville, "Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, CSD spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for nearly all human transportation"1. New Urbanism, therefore, represents the converse of this planning ideology. It stresses traditional planning, including multi-purpose zoning,