| Colin, I'm really struggling to think of a topic for our human geography assignment. |
| Me too, Rosie. |
| I'll tell you what, let's think about the different aspects of human geography |
| and see if we can narrow the topic down a bit to help us decide. |
| Okay. |
| So one aspect is population. |
| That would be all about population density and migration and so on. |
| Lots of facts and statistics. |
| Maybe a bit boring? |
| Yeah, but quite straightforward to find on the internet. |
| Suppose so. |
| How about health? |
| I'd never thought about the links between that and geography until Professor Lee gave us that lecture on cholera - |
| how in the 19th century, a physician used street plans and plans of water supplies to find the source of a cholera epidemic. |
| Yes, fascinating, wasn't it? |
| Or we could do something more general like economies. |
| So how financial and commercial factors are linked to the physical environment. |
| I thought that had been taken off the syllabus for this year. |
| Has it? |
| I'm not sure... |
| but it might be best to avoid it. |
| Okay. |
| Maybe we could do something on culture. |
| We had that lecture about culture and geography last week. |
| I didn't get much out of that. |
| It was all so general and the lecturer didn't give any useful examples. |
| Yeah, I hardly took any notes... it didn't seem worth it. |
| Me neither. |
| We could focus on poverty. |
| That's something that's a global problem. |
| The trouble is, Dr Lee was saying, that you have to be careful with some of the figures relating to poverty. |
| They're sometimes deliberately manipulated. |
| You mean the information gets changed for political reasons? |
| That sort of thing, yes. |
| So what are we going to do our assignment on? |
| I'll tell you what. |
| One of the possibilities we haven't discussed is urbanisation |
| and now over half the world's population lives in cities. |
| That's really important. |
| Okay, good idea, Rosie. |
| Let's do that. |
| I love living in a big city but of course there are problems. |
| Things like theft and robbery? |
| Yes, but where I come from, that's linked to another more serious issue, |
| which is that a lot of people don't have jobs. |
| That's getting worse and worse. |
| And we also still have quite a lot of people who are homeless, |
| though that's not quite so bad as it was. |
| It'd be nice to talk about some positive developments, |
| like some of the new developments on the outskirts of cities. |
| Yeah, they've opened some massive new shopping centres outside my city. |
| Yeah, the same with mine, |
| but it's meant a lot of the shops in the city centre are closing down. |
| But the outskirts are ideal for buildings that need a lot of space, like for conferences. |
| They've opened a couple of big ones. |
| Yes, we've got some too. |
| It'd be nicer to have more facilities for things like football too, |
| but that's not happening where I live. |
| Same in my area. |
| We could include something about developing disused industrial sites. |
| It seems like a good idea because you're not doing any harm to the natural environment. |
| Yeah, but aren't the buildings architecturally significant? |
| Not really. |
| And what people forget is that they often used quite dangerous materials, chemicals and things, |
| which haven't been properly cleared away, so the whole site has to be made safe. |
| Hmm, that can't be cheap. |
| And I bet it's often not budgeted for. |
| You're right. |
| Have you read about Masdar City? |
| In Abu Dhabi? Yes. |
| It was designed to be a green city, wasn't it? |
| That might be a good example of a city which set out to depend entirely on renewable energy. |
| Yes we should say something about that. |
| It was designed to be totally pedestrianised too, wasn't it? |
| With the transport underground. |
| Yes and they had big plans for recycling to reduce waste to the lowest possible level. |
| But let's stick to talking about power sources. |
| Then there's that ecotown in England, Greenhill Abbotts. |
| It set out to conform to the usual principles, sustainability and so on. |
| A lot of people were against it at first. |
| They said the plans were unrealistic. |
| I'm not sure how far they've got with it... |
| I'll check. |
| Right. |
| So it looks as if we have a sort of plan... |