Resumen Geografía Test B

Urbanization:
Definitions:
- Urbanization: an increase in the percentage of people living in towns and cities.
- Site: is the actual place of the settlement.
- Situation: the settlement in relation of its surrounding features.
- Carrying capacity: the maximum population size of a biological species that
can be sustained by that specific environment.
- Shanty town: a settlement of improvised buildings known as shanties or shacks,
typically made of materials such as mud and wood.
- Megacity: a very large city with a population of more than 10 million people.
Types of settlement:
- Lineal: buildings are strung around a line, usually a road or river.
- Nucleated: buildings are grouped together. There are different types: T-shaped,
cross-shaped…
- Dispersed: isolated individual buildings.
Factors affecting settlement:
- Land with available building resources, fuel and fertile soil to grow crops.
- Physical features used as protection like mountains, built in high elevation,
rivers and sea.
- Good communication, built in a linking point between cities…
Hierarchy of settlements:

Why some settlement grows to cities:

Urbanization in:
- HIC’s: urbanization occurred during the 19th Century, caused by the Industrial
Revolution. New job opportunities appeared in cities while the labor needed in
farms was reduced due to the introduction of new machines. This process was
very gradual and slow and took a lot of years to complete.
- LIC’s: urbanization here is caused by the increase in job opportunities in cities
and the expectation to have better living conditions (pull factors) and lack of
development in the countryside (push factors). However, this process in LIC’s is
 much faster because the new technologies have already been developed and they
just had to be introduced.
Urban land use models:
- Hoyt model: sectorial-based model. Represents and divides the city based on
the communication infrastructure.
- Burgess model: radical-based model. Shows the social-economic
background of the city.
Different zones:
- CBD: big shops, historical buildings, offices, good transport links, few housing,
expensive land.
- Transition zone: cheaper land, old factories transformed into offices and
apartment blocks, good transport links.
- Inner city: terraced houses, narrow streets, corner shops, parks, cheap land,
originally built to house factory workers.
- Inner suburbs: bigger semi-detached houses with gardens and parking, wider
streets, corner shops and restaurants.
- Outer suburbs: detached houses, parks and open areas, big shops/shopping
centers, cheap land.
- Rural-urban fringe: mix of land uses (business parks, sciences parks, industrial
states, motorways, leisure parks), people looking for a village atmosphere.
Problem associated with urbanization:
- Pollution (air, water, noise and light)
- Inequality: big contrast between rich and poor. Poor people tend to be located
in shanty towns with poor living conditions and public services. Meanwhile, rich
people live in the city center with good infrastructure (segregation).
- Housing issues: poor quality housing, too high demand for housing (causing
conflicts over land-tenure).

Solutions to urban challenges:

- Clear chanty town and provide new houses.
- Providing public services.
- Improve infrastructure: widen roads, improve public transport…
If there is a bigger investment:
- Build new cities.
- Build or create green cities with new environmental legislation.
- Sustainable development: encourage public transport + bicycles.
- Change to cleaner energies. 
- Move industries to outkicks of the city. 
Weather and Climate:
Definitions:
- Weather: is the state of the atmosphere at a given time. 
- Climate: the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long
period.
Measures and instruments:
- Wind (strength/speed + direction): speed is measured with anemometer,
direction with wind vane.
- Temperature: measured with the thermometer.
- Air pressure: measured with barometer. Cold air goes down causing high
pressure and hot air goes up causing low pressure.
- Precipitation: measured with rain gauge.
- Sunshine: measured with the Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder.
- Humidity: measured with a hygrometer.
Atmospheric circulation model:
- Zones near the Equator receives more sunshine and it’s hotter because sun rays
and sun radiation reaches the Earth directly, focusing all in a small zone. On the
zones near the poles happens exactly the opposite.
- Different cells: Hadley cell (driven by temperatures, cold air goes down once it
reaches the Equator and goes up when reaches the tropics), Ferrel cell (not
driven by temperatures, acts like a gear between the two other cells, goes in the
opposite direction to the others) and Polar cells (act driven by temperatures,
same thing in the Hadley cell)

Types of rainfall:
- Relief rainfall: prevailing winds pick moisture from the sea. Due to physical
features like mountains, the air is forced to rise. It gets cold, condenses and
causes rain.
- Frontal rainfall: happens when there’s a collision between a warm and cold
front. The moist warm air is forced to move up, pushed by the cold front,
causing it to condensate and form rainy clouds.
- Convectional rainfall: Earth’s surface is heated by the Sun. Water from the
ground or plants evaporates, goes up, condenses, form cloud and rains.
Anticyclones and depressions:
- Anticyclones: high pressure zones, good weather.
 - Depressions: low pressure, bad weather.
Factors affecting climate:
- Coastal location: zones near the coast will have mild climates because of the
sea ability to absorb heat from the Sun.
- Thickness of the atmosphere.
- Latitude.
- Ocean currents.
- Winds
- Clouds.