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ROSIE Colin, I’m really struggling to think of a topic for our human geography assignment.
COLIN 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.
ROSIE OK. 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?
COLIN Yeah, but quite straightforward to find on the internet.
ROSIE 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.
COLIN Yes, fascinating, wasn’t it? Or we could do something more general like economies
ROSIE So how financial and commercial factors are linked to the physical environment
COLIN Yeah
ROSIE I thought that had been taken off the syllabus for this year
COLIN Has it
ROSIE I not sure but it might be best to avoid it
COLIN OK. Maybe we could do something on culture. We had that lecture about culture and geography last week.
ROSIE I didn’t get much out of that. It was all so general and the lecturer didn’t give any useful examples.
COLIN Yeah, I hardly took any notes. It didn’t seem worth it.
ROSIE Me neither.
COLIN We could focus on poverty. That’s something that’s a global problem.
ROSIE 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.
COLIN You mean the information gets changed for political reasons?
ROSIE That sort of thing, yes.
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ROSIE So what are we going to do our assignment on? I’ll tell you what. One of the possibilities we have discussed is urbanisation and now over half the world population lives in cities. That really important
COLIN OK good idea Rosie Let do that
ROSIE I love living in a big city but of course there are problems
COLIN Things like theft and robbery?
ROSIE 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.
COLIN It would be nice to talk about some positive developments, like some of the new developments on the outskirts of cities.
ROSIE Yeah, they’ve opened some massive new shopping centres outside my city.
COLIN Yeah, the same with mine, but it means 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.
ROSIE 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.
COLIN Same in my area.
ROSIE 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.
COLIN Yeah, but aren’t the buildings architecturally significant?
ROSIE 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.
COLIN Hmm, that can’t be cheap. And I bet it’s often not budgeted for.
ROSIE You’re right.
COLIN Have you read about Masdar City?
ROSIE 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.
COLIN Yes we should say something about that It was designed to be totally pedestrianised too wasn’t it with the transport underground
ROSIE 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.
COLIN 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.
ROSIE Right. So it looks as if we have a sort of plan.
