I really quite enjoyed the Athens charter part in the course.  I may regret saying this but i actually enjoyed reading the Athens Charter.  I like that Le Corbusier actually made realistic guidelines, and there was very specific instructions as to what needed to be done to great the best city, the happiest people and the safest areas.  I really enjoyed the fact that there is a science as to what direction the buildings have to be facing so that the residents get the ideal amount of sunlight to make them the happiest that they can be.  I think that this is so important because of the seasonal affected disorder.  I think that in the dark days if there is still some sort of sunlight that many people would be less affected.  I think that this “master plan” could not only fix the physical community space, it could also fix mental problems.

Also the importance of green spaces.  I think that it is very important to have many green spaces especially with so many people living in high rises.  It is important to have areas that people can just be free and roam free.  It is an area that children can run and be free. But it also looks as if the nature has not been completely destroyed. There is some hope for the area, and it is not just a town of mass amounts of concrete.

For me I really I enjoyed the Athens Charter because of its practicality.

I have been thinking a lot during this class as to why the City of Kelowna and the City of West Kelowna seem to be so awkwardly planned.  The main reason that I can come up with is the lake.  Everyone wants to be near the lake or to see the lake.  Our lifestyle revolves around the lake, whither we know it or not.  The main reason people migrate to this area is the lake.  So around the lake there are more and more high rises going up so the amount of people that can be near the lake is much denser.  Also the houses near the lake are extremely expensive, and the lots are very small.  It is all about the view and the connivence of living right on the water.  And between the two cities there is one road that connects them, and that highway is really the only way to get around in the cities.  A driver pretty much has to either cross the highway or merge onto the highway to get anywhere.

This is a problem that I have with the urban planning of the two cities.  There is only one way to get around, and over the lake.  This seems like the worst type of planning. How is this convient or practical for anyone. What if the bridge just happened to get crumble and break. How would people get back and forth. There was no back up plan that went into planning that crossing.

For me, I took this class because when I went to change my schedule there was no other history courses that looked interesting and that were open.  In the beginning of the course I really did not give this class a fair shot.  I just kept thinking to myself, what is the point of this, there cannot be that much that goes into planning a city, and if there is how come every city that I hate lived in seems to be horribly planned out.  I do not understand how people are paid to make up these plans and either they are not carried out properly, or just planned so poorly.

I was poorly mistaken.  This class has opened my eyes to an extraordinary amount of thought and planning that has gone into planning every city.  The amount of people that have tried to create the ultimate master plan, is so numerous!

This class has 100% opened my eyes to the amount of planning that goes into urban planning.  I now drive or fly into Edmonton, Alberta, my hometown and see all sorts of different topics that we have discussed in class. For example green spaces close to high rises, how dense population is around water, and just in general where pockets of people live and make their homes.  Also I notice the monuments and the building as a monument.  The parliament building in edmonton is made to be a marvel.  Of course, it is older now and not so much amazing.  But you could see when it was built that it probably was this amazing feat.

The French suburbs, or the banlieue, have been the sites for high poverty, crime and unemployment rates.   They also happen to house a large portion of France’s immigrant population (Musterd, 2008). During the years that followed World War Two, the French government encouraged immigration from its former colonies to help the lacking labour market. The Algerian War resulted in many immigrants finding habitation in “shantytowns” on the outskirts of French cities after being released from internment camps (Kjeilen, n.d.). As cities started to become more developed, these shantytowns were abandoned and immigrants moved to apartments that were relatively cheap to rent, which went on to be demolished with no other social housing plans in sight. This forced immigrants to be pushed to the suburbs, leading to the ghettoization of them (Musterd, 2008). As a result, this segregation appears to feed into a sort of neo-colonialism in France.

Second generation immigrants, an alienating term in itself, are feeling the brunt of these racist ideologies. A study done by BBC found that the unemployment was higher among North African university students compared to White French Students (BBC News, 2005). This has led to a feeling of hopelessness among second generation students. Racial profiling proliferates in the banlieue (Valentine, 2005). A 2005 Amnesty International report finding that the judicial system in France appears to condone racially motivated violence by police forces (Amnesty International, 2005). A report four years later by the same organization found that the French government did not appear to investigate racially motivated murders and abuses by the police (Amnesty International, 2009).

Muslims in France have had an extremely hard time being accepted and integrated into the French community, with Algerian Muslims being subjected to a “quasi-apartheid” during the time Algeria was a French colony (Bell and Gaffney, 2000). These feelings towards Muslims, and subsequently Islam, have continued to present day. The lack of opportunities for these people, and a fear created mostly by the media, has alienated a whole population. If these people felt discriminated against and powerless, they may have turned to an organization which offered them some sort of power and control. Since their faith is often attacked, a group that believes in the superiority of that faith would be appealing. This fear of “the Other” and Islamophobia, something that runs rampant in Western Society, has made way for extremists to pick these youths up because they have no one else batting for them. Of course, I am in no way blaming or even suggesting this is the fault of any one of the victims of these serious attacks, but maybe it’s time for Westerners to realize that people of colour are just as entitled to having a meaningful place in Western society as they are. Immigrants and visible minorities should also get the chance to feel patriotic about the countries they live in, not just scared and ostracized. Why humanity always seems to repeat history’s civil rights mistakes, even though we look back at how people were treated with horror and disgust, is a question society at large really needs to attend to.

Works Cited

Bell, D., & Gaffney, J. (2000). Political Leadership: From the Fourth to the Fifth Republic. In Presidential power in Fifth Republic France. Oxford: Berg Publications.

France: The search for justice : The effective impunity of law enforcement officers in cases of shootings,deaths in custody or torture and ill-treatment. (2005, April 5). Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR21/001/2005/en/.

French Muslims face job discrimination. (2005, November 2). BBC News. Retrieved from

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4399748.stm.

Kjeilen, T. (n.d.). Pied-Noir. In LookLex Encyclopedia. Norway.
Musterd, S. (2008). Banlieues, the Hyperghetto and Advanced Marginality: A Symposium on Loïc

Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts. City, 12(1), 107-114. Retrieved November 27, 2015, from

http://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/doi/pdf/10.1080/13604810801933776.

Public outrage: Police officers above the law in France. (2009, April 2). Retrieved from

http://www.statewatch.org/news/2009/apr/ai-france-police-report.pdf.

Valentine, V. (2005, November 8). Economic Despair, Racism Drive French Riots. National Public Radio.

Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5004897.

The past few classes, we have discussed how the socialist regime dictated how cities are developed in eastern European countries, and how they have changed in post-socialist times. It was interesting to me that influences of economics and politics have a profound affect on cities. In another class that I am in, I am researching on the Peoples Republic of China and its societal and urban restraints of the Hukou System. The Hukou System is a household registration system that dictates largely where and how people live between rural and urban areas within China. Broadly, the system was designed to not only provide population statistics and identify personal status but to also regulate population distribution. A rural migrant seeking work in an urban area would lose access to services such as health care, employer –provided housing and would not qualify for grain rations (Pines, 344). The Hukou system can be traced back to 1317 (Young, 30), but the modern origins began in the 1950s when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began to follow a Soviet-style development that promoted heavy industrialization. Urban planning during 1950-1960 in communist China was focused on selecting locations for factories and industrial plants, service facilities as well as design the layout of industrial towns and residential districts. (Tang, 347). Similar to communist Russia, China’s plans included formulistic street patterns, grand building designs and monuments, and large public squares as a way to demonstrate the power of the communist era (Tang, 350). During the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s, the planning of the socialist city under the People’s Republic of China placed peoples livelihoods second to the socialist principles, resulting in large-scale urban development and little progress of residential facilities and amenities. The Great Leap Forward demanded a large amount of labour and so a great internal migration between rural to urban areas occurred. To fund the rapid industrialization that the PRC sought, the PRC turned to the countryside to extract its agricultural resources. Rural workers moved to the cities to seek work due to a rising famine after the extraction, placing a strain on the infrastructure of the cities. As a result, rural workers lost their social welfare benefits as dictated by the Hukou system. A social order also emerged due to the Hukou system as urban governments looked after urban residents while rural citizens would essentially be left to fend for themselves (Wallace, 81). Socialist policies greatly affected not only China’s urban development, but also rural development as well. Although the PRC sought to match western industrialization growth, the divide between rural and urban citizens grew quite large which affected the country not only socially, but economically.

This is a quick summary of the PRC and the Hukou system, but it is apparent that the socialist ideology has affected many areas, resulting in not only a physical change in China’s city, but a social change as well.

Pines, David. Topics in Public Economics: Theoretical and Applied Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Tang, W.-S. “Chinese Urban Planning at Fifty: An Assessment of the Planning Theory Literature.” Journal of Planning Literature 14.3 (2000): 347-66. Web. 26 Nov. 2015.

Wallace, Jeremy L. “China’s Loophole to the Faustian Bargain of Urban Bias.” Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, & Regime Survival in China. Oxford UP, 2014. 73-80. Print.

Young, Jason. China’s Hukou System Markets, Migrants and Institutional Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Urban Planners often take into consideration the importance of spatial concerns; often these environmental concerns are directly correlated to the city’s design. Aspects like public works, and the city layout are designed to address the immediate environmental concerns. The initiatives that each city takes on are issues that are directly correlation in the municipal area.  During a shift in the twentieth century, urban planners began to look deeper into environmental sustainability. This shift can be seen in sanctuary creation and more environmentally friendly projects within the urban design. This year, the District of Lake Country, a merging of Winfield, Oyama, and Carrslanding turned twenty. The District’s primary goal was to promote a more environmentally friendly region with the introduction of initiatives like wild-life reservations, and the recently completed hydro dam.  The turbine generator project for the district was first envisioned a century ago with the creation of the first irrigation system to supply water to Okanagan orchards.

Lake Country’s water originated from reservoirs at high elevations, a hydro generation system was feasible.  Due to the seasonal instability of water flow, and the lack of financial support, the idea did not receive support until the twenty-first century.  In 2003, efforts were initiated to create a hydro dam with further government funding and technology.  In composed urban plans, in the nineteenth-century, financial concerns are put forward as an obstacle in practical implementation.  Major concerns around the project was the risk involved in investing in such a large plan.  Stakeholders had initially shown concern that the project was too high risk. Upon approaching the water service advisory commission, Utility Manager Jack Allingham, from the district returned with a diplomatic response of ten against at one for it. Despite the negative response, the council in Lake Country pushed for the project and provided a unanimous vote; the project cost four million dollars.  Despite this large price tag, the District of Lake Country received a significant subsidization; “a two million dollar grant from the federal Gas Tax and another half a million through the Community Works Fund”, and “The remainder of the capital was covered through low interest municipal loans and a 10 year production grant from Natural Resources Canada”.  It was predicted that the financial return would provide enough financial support to pay off these small loans.  Along with initiatives to pay for the dam project, the district created a fund that would direct the Dam’s profits to future green initiatives.  The District expects profits to be able to contribute four-point-five million dollars to this fund over the next twenty years.  This August, the micro turbine is able to provide electricity to four-hundred inhabitants in Lake Country.  This project, now twelve-year-old hydro dam project in Lake Country, reinforces that modern urban planners have shifted from a singular approach to public works to more dual perspective.

If you are interested in learning more about this project, you can watch the embedded video:

References:

“An Old Idea Gets New Life: District of Lake Country’s Turbine Generator.” BC Climate Action Toolkit. Accessed November 28, 2015. http://www.toolkit.bc.ca/success-story/old-idea-gets-new-life-district-lake-countrys-turbine-generator.