Writing and sketching reflections on a city’s development.

Student Journal

Guide - Platonic Solids

City Map

Discover the complexities of urban planning, including housing, transportation, energy consumption and production, readiness for natural hazards, and sustainable development concepts. Prototype a solar panel for a sustainable city, integrating this design into their city sketches. In doing so, students will create their own unique urban layout. Students can expand their city designs upon completion whilst addressing the Sustainable Development Goals.

#### Lesson Structure

When students go through this lesson in each section the objectives they will learn are:


*   **Warm-up** – Recognise that a city is a large community made
up of many smaller communities where many people live and work
together.

*   **Imagine** – Explain the needs and challenges of people
living in a city and potential problems or design constraints in
particular cities.

*   **Create** – Construct models of the solar panel array for the
city’s sustainable infrastructure.

*   **Build** – Build a unified city layout planning out the
energy, transportation, green spaces, and housing for the
community.

*   **Reflect** – Reflect on urban planners' challenges in
creating sustainable cities through student designs.

*   **Challenges** – Extend your learning through opportunities to
expand city design, focusing on sustainability and innovation. 

#### After this lesson students will be able to:

*   Discuss and explore different community needs, including
connecting individual neighbourhoods into a unified city.

*   Planning with a map incorporating renewable energy measures to
the city's sustainable development.

*   Design a city around different scenarios such as geographic
location, population growth, conservation, preservation, or
prevention against natural hazards.

*   Practice communication skills through a collaborative
large-scale project.

*   Reproduce different architectural features in a variety of
scales.

Teacher Notes

Overview and Objectives

Materials

Facilitation and Collaboration Work

#### Teachers: Preparing Your Students (35-90 min)

When students begin the lesson, they start in [Overview and Objectives](#overview-and-objectives), then transition to this [Preparation](#preparation) section. Presented in their view is a vocabulary list of terms and infographics illustrating concepts across STEAM domains throughout this entire lesson.

There are extra guides and optional short intro lessons for preparing student readiness for their first engagement of new terms and content knowledge. Print or distribute the student journal and guides digitally. 

* Read through the vocabulary list. (5 minutes)
* Review the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). (10 minutes)
*   Review the Platonic Solids and Prisms. Download the optional asset and share it with students. (10 minutes)
* *Optional*: Distribute or print ahead the **Urban Planning - Student Map** asset for guiding students in their planning for use during [Create](#create) and [Build](#build) sections of this lesson. (5 minutes)

#### Sustainable Development Goals (10 min)

Review the [Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)](https://sdgs.un.org/goals) blueprint based on global needs to create a more sustainable world by 2030 before starting the lesson.

Student journal

#### Vocabulary (5 minutes)

This is the list of vocabulary terms used throughout the lesson. They will be in **bold** and the definition listed throughout the different sections and in **Student Journal** asset. Students can always revisit the vocabulary definitions with media and questions in the lesson. (5 minutes)

#### Platonic Solids and Prisms (10 minutes)

Review the Platonic Solids and Prisms as they are briefly referenced in this lesson. There is an **optional** guide used as a printout or can be shared online to students before they engage this lesson. Download the optional guide. (10 minutes)

Preparation

### Facilitation and Collaboration Work

Students can read and answer questions independently or as a group.

#### Communities 

* What is a **community**? At its most basic level, communities are groups of people brought together by a common interest, goal, or geographical location. Schools are a quintessential example of communities. Teachers, staff, and students come together with the common goal of learning and helping each other to learn.
* What elements combine to form a **community**? They must be composed of three things: people, place (or space), and purpose. Although we typically think of a place as somewhere physically geographic, it can also reference an online space. Throughout history, people formed communities to survive. For example, people in communities helped each other harvest food, protection from enemies, and building shelter.
* How are communities and cities related? Over time, some communities grew bigger and bigger until they formed cities. The first cities were thought to be founded as centres for agriculture and food in Mesopotamia around 7500 BCE. The organisation of a city allowed people to store food collectively for more extended periods of time and grow more prosperous than if they depended on what could be grown season to season. Cities also developed for **trade** and **commerce**, centres of government and religion, while others were founded for defensive purposes.

**Urbanisation** benefits people because there are more chances for employment in a city than in rural areas due to the sheer number of people living there. Employment opportunities range from the service industry to financial, engineering, medical, and other high-paying occupations. As more people come to a city, it creates more jobs and opportunities for others. 

People can work toward shared goals by pooling resources because working together can accomplish much more.
Some cities are built around a significant river system for transporting goods from shipping. In addition, people could travel to other places on the river and encourage trade to strengthen a business. A city square or centre is a common gathering space for purchasing goods.

#### Critical Roles for Urban Planning

When it comes to a city’s development, there are key roles in building the community, starting with these:

* Planner – plans the activities required to achieve the desired goal.
* Designer/Architect – creator of a look and/or function of something before it is made.
* Engineer – builds, runs, and maintains machines, engines, and structures.

**Arts and Culture:** Cities are thriving places for the creation of arts and the development of culture. Rather than being the sole work of a single talented individual, these art forms culminate as a vibrant expression of a diverse population living and interacting together. The types of art may be lasting and on a grand scale, or they may be more minor acts of artistic voice, advocacy, and resistance. As artists flow into a city, fellow artists follow, creating communities where creative, cutting-edge, open-minded, and experimental ideas and techniques are welcomed and cultivated.  

**Economy:** Cities are vital hubs in developing new jobs and markets, and their large scale of ongoing human interaction encourages the formation of innovative economic ventures, opportunities, and growth. These urban developments often offer the possibility of a better job and an improved quality of life. City building includes more than just considering its buildings and roadways. Urban planning focuses on economic considerations and how people must develop novel skills and behaviours and even work together to alter the existing culture to generate industries, services, and capital.

A city planner could make a plan with the necessary steps required to build a public park and consider all the stakeholders and how people would be affected. They would hire an architect to design the park. An engineer would build, run, and maintain the structures.

Warm-up

#### Infrastructure

The basic system for a city uses infrastructure. Examples of systems for infrastructure include transportation, housing, public safety, health services, communication networks, water sanitation systems, and electric power grid systems.

#### Transportation

There are three main types of transportation in urban areas: **Collective** or public transportation, individual transportation, and **freight** transportation. Each system has a different purpose. **Collective transportation** moves many people regularly, such as on a bus or subway.  Examples of individual transportation include bicycles, personal cars, taxi services, and pedestrian walking. **Freight** transportation is the movement of goods from one place to another. In urban areas, this may occur with large lorries or delivery vans. The flow of people and goods across and within urban locations is the primary focus of all three types of transportation. 

As cities increase in size and intricacy, the potential for challenges and disruptions to this flow of people and goods grows within these urban developments.



* _Parking and Traffic_: Motor vehicle congestion in cities is often expected, but it becomes more pronounced and widespread as city population totals surge over 1 million residents. Even with the parking allocations available, motor vehicles parking along streets lessens the number of lanes available for circulating through the city. These challenges create major urban planning concerns when coupled with inefficient traffic signals and stops. 
* _Increased Commute Times_: As housing outside of the city becomes more affordable, many commuters are willing to drive longer to their job in the city. This commuting trend creates further inner-city traffic. 
* _Shortcomings of Public Transport_: Public transport systems struggle as they can become crowded, uncomfortable, and in high demand at times of the day. This shared transportation system may be under-used at different times of the day, and the costs to maintain this system and lack of funding present difficulties. 
* _Pedestrians and Cyclists_: Cities are learning to provide paths, storage, and infrastructure for city pedestrians and bicycle riders. One challenge for city builders is considering how to create these designs with existing parking and roads considering safety. 
* _Further challenges_: Road congestion in the cities has led to issues with noise levels, loss of public space, and air pollution. The resulting impact on human physical and social health and environmental harm has led to growing efforts to develop cars that run on alternative, cleaner fuels.

Many people depend on **freight** transportation to deliver groceries and other goods to stores and homes. **Freight** transportation is vital to the economy, but large lorries can wear down roads and motorways and cause more congestion.

Benefits to **collective** transportation include transporting large amounts of people at a low cost to passengers and less congestion in cities. A drawback is that **collective** transportation may be expensive to maintain and provide at a low cost during non-peak hours. Individual transportation can benefit the environment if people are walking or biking, but it could be harmful if many individuals drive personal cars.

#### Housing

* City inhabitants require housing that is affordable and safe. They need proper access to public transportation, health care, green areas, and public spaces. Safe housing must also include clean and properly maintained waste management systems. Billions of people worldwide are packed into densely populated, low-income, urban residential areas that may lack these basic needs.
* Cities must consider rebuilding and restructuring unsuitable housing and keeping housing affordable. City planners are also responsible for involving local people in the decision-making process, empowering residents to guide the direction of housing and community development.

#### Earth and Human Activity 

As cities grow, the risks of natural disasters devastating a densely populated city area. According to the United Nations, there are 1,146 cities with populations over 500,000. Nearly 60% of these cities are at risk for at least one type of six natural disasters: flooding, cyclones or hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions or droughts. This means that nearly 1.4 billion people are at risk of suffering from a natural disaster.

#### Sponge Cities

To adapt to climate change and flooding, many cities across the globe, such as Berlin, Germany, and Wuhan, China, are creating more green spaces and wetlands and restoring floodplains. These “sponge” methods are surprising ways cities can mitigate the damages from flooding and prevent future flooding.  Floods occur in cities when there is excess water from storms that overwhelm the drainage systems, when a nearby river floods, or when hurricanes and cyclones hit a region. Sponge city initiatives focus on absorbing and reusing the water rather than diverting it from the city.

Cities also may remove concrete and create natural **swales** to capture rainwater. Or, they add soil and plants to roofs to make what is known as a **green roof**. While concrete acts as a barrier to water and causes flooding, natural surfaces of soil and plants actually absorb the water. Engineers harness the captured water as a natural air conditioner to cool the city. Cities also restore floodplains and recreate artificial floodways so that when hurricanes hit, the water can be diverted into the floodplain.

City planners would need to analyse their city and make a comprehensive list of every area and building potentially affected by natural hazards such as hurricanes, tornados, or tsunamis. They then need to plan out what each zone would need to do to lessen the risk of each situation. City planners need to prioritise the areas that would be most affected and create a budget for upgrading these zones. They should also make emergency evacuation plans that clearly explain what people should do in floods and ensure those are translated into all languages and distributed in various manners, including via social media.

#### Green Spaces and Parks

Green spaces provide a natural surface to absorb water, and green spaces help urban dwellers experience the benefits of nature right in their own communities and neighbourhoods. Green spaces offer numerous health benefits to city residents. These spaces can be calming and peaceful areas of respite and relaxation. Several studies have found these outdoor areas, in turn, improve mental health and lessen stress. Physical health is also enhanced as people find a place to walk and be active.

Further, water evaporates from the plants in green spaces and cools the surrounding areas. This can help people in cities to avoid overheating. Additional studies have found that green spaces help lessen premature mortality and the harmful effects of air pollution in cities.

#### Energy Production and Consumption

Engineers have a two-fold problem, dealing with the waste that cities produce and producing enough electricity to sustain millions of lives. One solution which solves both problems is anaerobic digestion, a process that breaks down waste and releases methane gas simultaneously. This gas can be harnessed to create electricity and heat through energy transfer. Solar panels are also another cost-effective way to produce electricity. Energy from the sun is free and does not use water to convert into electricity. As solar companies create solar panels with more cost-effective designs, city designers can rely on this free energy to produce electricity and reduce human dependence on fossil fuels.

Newer solar panel prototypes are less expensive, and cities can purchase these at a lower cost than previously. Engineers continue to innovate solar panels, selling at a lower price in exchange for a longer commitment. Engineers could work with cities and citizens to develop the best ways to integrate solar energy into all parts of the city entirely. As solar companies create solar panels with more cost-effective designs, city designers can rely on this free energy to produce electricity and reduce human dependence on coal, natural gas, and petroleum.

Imagine

#### Facilitation and Collaboration Work

Urban Planning is a large group and collaborative theme meaning you can have students work on the instructions together in large groups of 3-5. Sharing ideas amongst peers and helping each other is encouraged during this process.

Build rectangles to hold the solar panel

Build triangles and attach making 3 solar panel stands

Make the solar panel base

Cut and draw paper solar panels

Tape paper on solar panel base to complete

National Curriculum

Curriculum for Excellence

Create

#### Facilitation and Collaboration Work

Urban Planning is a large group and collaborative theme meaning you can have students work on the instructions together in large groups of 3-5. Sharing ideas amongst peers and helping each other is encouraged during this process.

Use the **Map** asset for students to plan the layout of their city.

Build 2 small rectangular prisms

Build 2 medium-sized rectangular prisms

Construct a small rectangular prism

Construct a tall rectangular prism

Build a flat rectangular prism

Assemble a long triangular prism

Build a house connecting the triangular and flat rectangular prisms together

Cut a paper sun and green roofs then tape roofs to top of buildings

Make flowers

Arrange the buildings and solar panels to make the city

Build

#### Facilitation and Collaborative Work

The following questions can be discussed in this lesson section as a class or within each group. You can use the **Student Journal** asset as a helpful resource to capture ideas and process on the computer or print it ahead of time and to be distributed.

Reflect

Challenges

References and Extra Resources

STEAM Classroom

UK - England

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

UK - Scotland

Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

SDGs

Goal 7

Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Goal 11

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

Goal 15

Human geography, including: types of settlement and land use, economic activity including trade links, and the distribution of natural resources including energy, food, minerals and water.

KS2-2

I can discuss the environmental impact of human activity and suggest ways in which we can live in a more environmentally responsible way.

SOC 2-08a

I can consider the advantages and disadvantages of a proposed land use development and discuss the impact this may have on the community.

🇬🇧 Urban Planning

Overview and Objectives

Lesson Structure

After this lesson students will be able to:

Structure