Unit 5, Listening 1, Part 1: Urban Settlements


Part 1: Urban Settlements

Narrator:       Almost 180,000 people move into cities each day. And now, for the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population live in urban settlements.

Urban settlements can be as large as megacities like Tokyo in Japan, with 35 million inhabitants . . . or as small as the city of Canterbury in the United Kingdom, home to little more than 40,000 residents.

And yet, they have many similarities.

Every urban settlement has a central business district in its historic core.

This trading district is always situated where several main roads meet, and is the primary location for shops, offices, restaurants, and entertainment.

High land value means few people live here.

This is the main difference between the central business district and other urban zones.

During the Industrial Revolution, many towns experienced a massive[1] influx of industry workers.

These workers and their families needed accommodation[2], and so thousands of new houses were built, close together, in a grid-like pattern around factories.

Today, with the decline of many traditional industries, many of these houses and factories have been replaced by wasteland[3] and cheap housing.

With a lack of employment, and low-value housing, many inner-city areas are characterized by urban decay[4], unemployment, and crime.

Wealthier urban residents can choose a suburban lifestyle on the outskirts[5] of the city.

Suburban houses are often bigger, with gardens, garages, and areas of open space.

Beyond suburbia lies the rural-urban fringe—the transition zone[6] between town and countryside—commonly dotted with business parks, shopping centers, hotels and, in many cases, airports.

Remarkably, urban settlements follow this basic pattern in almost every town and city in the developed world . . . transcending size, culture, and climate.


Part 2: Urban Land Use Models

Narrator:       Urban environments are complex interacting systems, constantly adapting to changes in technology, culture, and science. In order to understand how they evolve, we must look at their structure.

In 1924, Ernest Burgess devised the very first model explaining the social and economic structure of an urban area. His model was very simple, and showed how a city grows outward from a central point in a series of rings.

The most expensive land lies in the innermost ring—this is the central business district.

The next outward ring represents the cheapest land, with old factories and the poorest housing —this is the “inner city.”

After which, the land grows in value until the very outskirts of the city—occupied by the middle class in newer, larger homes.

This is the residential zone, called the “suburbs.”

In 1939, an economist named Homer Hoyt created a new model.

Hoyt proposed that a city develops in sectors[1] rather than rings, and took into account physical features such as hills and rivers.

Hoyt’s model also shows how industries develop alongside lines of communication . . . and areas of low-cost housing develop in industrial areas—so that laborers and factory workers can live close to their places of work.

But these models are only relevant in more economically developed countries.

Cities in less economically developed countries are very different. They still have a central business district. However, factories, businesses, and expensive apartments frequently develop along main roads out of cities.

The most impoverished[2] areas, known as shanty towns, are found either on the outskirts, or on poor-quality or “marginal” land that is not wanted by official developers because it is, for example, either steep, contaminated[3], or marshy.

Studying urban structure is important if we are to turn existing urban settlements into commercially viable[4] cities with better residential planning and environmental harmony[5].


[1] sector: noun a part of a particular area

[2] impoverished: adjective poor

[3] contaminated: adjective dirty, polluted, and dangerous

[4] viable: adjective able to be successful

[5] harmony: noun a state of peaceful existence and agreement


[1] massive: adjective extremely large

[2] accommodation: noun a place to live or stay

[3] wasteland: noun an area of land that cannot be used

[4] urban decay: noun the decline of a city due to neglect and age

[5] outskirts: noun parts of a city far from the center

[6] transition zone: noun a space between two very different areas

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