GPHY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Urban Ecology, Ron Herron, Gentrification

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Geography
• Course: GPHY 101
• Professor: Anne Godlewska

Document Summary

Suburbia, suburban culture and the development of the north american city. A series of concentric circles were seen to be expanding. Today i want to introduce an important urban process that has shaped every north american city and the lives of the majority of city dwellers: suburbia. We"ll take a historical approach as suburbs have been in development for the last 130 years or so. American suburbs began developing around north america"s largest cities from the late 19th century. The movement was already marked in the 1930s and was observed and commented on by the chicago school of sociology (a group of thinkers very influential in all the social sciences) The poor were seen to be living in the center of the city. Observing this, these sociologists invented the concept of urban ecology: a process of successive ring development around cities.