1. The Variety of Urban Environments
The Variety of Urban Environments
This is a link page to sub-pages that provide detailed lesson plans and learning activities that cover everything in the IB guide for this topic. Lesson plans include resources to use on an interactive whiteboard and worksheets to print.
Syllabus
Characteristics of urban places, including site, function, land use, hierarchy of settlement (including megacities) and growth process (planned or spontaneous)
Characteristics of Urban Places
This page provides resources and lesson activities on the characteristics of urban places. It uses a variety of place locations, including the Nile Delta, south England and Marindique in the Philippines to examine the spatial pattern of settlements. It introduces the concepts of site and situation through mapped locations. The settlement hierarchy is introduced and an informative video on why cities located where they is supported with a question sheet
Urban Growth
This page looks at the ways settlement grow in planned and unplanned ways through a number of places examples. It introduces the topic with a couple of short videos based on rapid urban growth, the second...
Syllabus
Factors affecting the pattern of urban economic activities (retail, commercial, industrial), including physical factors, land values, proximity to a central business district (CBD) and planning
Economic Activity in Urban Areas
This page explores the patterns of economic activity in urban areas. It examines the Central Business District, Industrial zones and change and the Rural Urban Fringe. Students first investigate through...
Syllabus
Factors affecting the pattern of residential areas within urban areas, including physical factors, land values, ethnicity and planning
Where People Live in Residential Areas
This page looks at the residential patterns in HICs, NICs and LICS. It focuses students first on the Brussels region, where students draw their own model based on the residential areas in the map. It...
Syllabus
The incidence of poverty, deprivation and informal activity (housing and industry) in urban areas at varying stages of development
The Patterns of Poverty in Urban Areas
This page provides a starter activity on abandoned homes in Detroit to recap the causes of poverty in HICs. Students then use the resources on the page to investigate poverty and deprivation in two places at contrasting stages of development, with the aim that they deliver a presentation in the next lesson. The page provides a large amount of current data, maps and embedded google views of Kibera, Kenya and Sparkbrook, UK, including links to some excellent KLF files for overlay work in Google Earth. For the UK it focuses on...