What kind of settlement is a Garden City?

Typically the day we start the new topic of Settlements in Year 8 Geography I find numerous articles about Settlements in the media!

There is a competition being held for people to design a new Garden City for somewhere in Britain, and the finalist for this Wolfson Economic Prize were announced today. They’ll definitely want to win the £250,000 prize!

So what is a Garden City? They began as ideal new towns which would separate industrial and residential areas, something which in the 1890s wasn’t happening in the dirty industrial cities expanding across Britain. They would  be surrounded by green belts of countryside so they’d feel like the countryside but would have the advantage of work, jobs and transport links like a city. The following video clip is about Letchworth in Hertfordshire which was one of the first Garden Cities which developed around 1910 -1920s:

The reason the government are interested in creating new settlements, like Garden Cities, is that there is a serious housing crisis in the UK. There is an estimate that the number of households (i.e. homes) will increase by 221,000 every year for the next decade (ten years) so we need to build new houses to cater for them. A Russian radio show recently did a report on the housing shortage:

The original article which drew my attention to the Garden City competition was found on the bbc: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27701245



What is life in suburbia like?

People tend to love or loathe living in the suburbs. The article in the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/guardianwitness-blog/2014/jun/04/life-in-the-suburbs-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly gets people to write in about whether they find it ugly, bad or wonderful! It might be hard to access people’s comment so it might easier to find it here: https://witness.theguardian.com/assignment/5386098ce4b0f6774a4ff2cb

What is suburbia? Suburbia describes a residential place on the edge of towns or cities called the suburbs and the social group of people who live there.


This picture of Dallas shows the city centre (CBD – Central Business District) in the background and suburbia in the foreground.