[00:49.06]Rosy: Colin，I’m really struggling to think of a topic for a human geography assignment.
[00:54.30]Colin: Me too, Rosy. I’ll tell you what – let’s think about the different aspects of human geography and see if we can narrow the topic down a bit to help us decide.
[01:04.35]Rosy: One aspect is population – that will be all about population density and migration and so on.
[01:11.22]Rosy: Lots of facts and statistics – maybe a bit boring.
[01:14.26]Colin: Yeah，but quite straightforward to find on the internet.
[01:18.31]Rosy: Suppose so. How about health?
[01:21.06]Rosy: I’d never thought about the links between that and geography until Professor Lee gave us that lecture on cholera. How in the 19th century, a physician used street plans and plans of water supplies to find the source of a cholera epidemic.
[01:34.14]Colin: Fascinating, wasn’t it?Or we could do something more general like economies？
[01:40.90]Rosy: So how financial and commercial factors are linked to the physical environment?
[01:45.07]I thought that had been taken off the syllabus for this year.
[01:48.00]Colin: Has it?
[01:48.70]Rosy: I am not sure. It might be best to avoid it.
[01:51.77]Colin: OK. Maybe we could do something on culture. We had that lecture about culture and geography last week.
[01:59.96]Rosy: I didn’t get much out of that. It was also general. The lecturer didn’t give any useful examples.
[02:06.10]Colin: I hardly took any notes.It didn’t seem worth it.
[02:09.11]Rosy: Me neither.
[02:10.40]Colin: We could focus on poverty.That’s something that’s a global problem.
[02:15.01]Rosy: The trouble is Doctor Lee was saying that you have to be careful with some of the figures relating to poverty. They’re sometimes deliberately manipulated.
[02:22.94]Colin: You mean the information gets changed for political reasons?
[02:26.58]Rosy: That sort of thing, yes.
[03:19.07]Rosy: So what are we gonna do our assignment on?
[03:22.31]Rosy: I’ll tell you what – one of the possibilities we haven’t discussed is urbanization, and how now over half the world’s population lives in cities.That’s really important.
[03:33.03]Colin: Ok, good idea, Rosie. Let’s do that.
[03:35.84]Rosy: I love living in a big city but there are problems.
[03:39.11]Colin: Things like theft and robbery？
[03:41.11]Rosy: Yes，but where I come from, that’s linked to another more serious issue, which is that a lot of people don’t have jobs. That’s getting worse and worse.
[03:50.49]We also still have quite a lot of people who are homeless, though that’s not quite so bad as it was.
[03:55.88]Colin: It would be nice to talk about some positive developments – like some of the new developments on the outskirts of cities.
[04:03.10]Rosy: Yeah. They’ve opened some massive new shopping centers outside my city.
[04:07.16]Colin: Yes, the same with mine. But it’s meant a lot of the shops in the city center are closing down. But the outskirts are ideal for buildings that need a lot of space – like for conferences.
[04:19.18]They’ve opened a couple of big ones.
[04:21.80]Rosy: yes，we’ve got some too. It’ll be nicer to have more facilities for things like football too. But that’s not happening where I live.
[04:28.47]Colin: Same in my area.
[04:30.10]Rosy: We could include something about developing disused industrial sites. It seems like a good idea because you’re not doing any harm to the natural environment.
[04:39.00]Colin: Yeah. But aren’t the buildings architecturally significant?
[04:43.09]Rosy: Not really. What people forget is that they often used quite dangerous materials – chemicals and things – which haven’t been properly cleared away.
[04:51.75]The whole site has to be made safe.
[04:54.11]Colin: That can’t be cheap.I bet it’s often not budgeted for.
[04:58.29]Rosy: You’re right.
[04:59.28]Colin: Have you read about Masdar City?
[05:01.59]Rosy: In Abu Dhabi? Yes, it was designed to be a green city, wasn’t it? That might be a good example of a city which set out to depend entirely on renewable energy.
[05:11.49]Colin: Yes, we should say something about that. It was designed to be totally pedestrianized too, wasn’t it? With the transport underground?
[05:21.01]Rosy: Yes. They had big plans for recycling to reduce waste to the lowest possible level, but let’s stick to talking about power sources.
[05:29.18]Colin: Then there’s that eco-town in England – Greenhill Albert. It sets out to conform to the usual principles – sustainability and so on.
[05:38.72] A lot of people were against it at first. They said the plans were unrealistic. I’m not sure how far they’ve got with it. I’ll check.
[05:48.41]Rosy: Right，looks as if we have a sort of plan.
