Know your place (Glasgow, that is)

Categories: Urban

When I left work today, I had all but one of my lessons for tomorrow planned. As it happens, this one lesson has taken me forever, and it's still not very inspired, so apologies. We are just about finished Industry with Higher, and normally teach the Urban topic next. The booklet that we are going to use covers urban models before site, situation and function, but I think it makes much more sense to look at these first. I thought I'd start the period with some sounds from Sauchiehall street in Glasgow, our case study city. This is a topic which last year seemed to come very easily to students as you are on (literally) such familiar ground. This is just a bit of scene setting. I'm expecting that when I play it, some people will guess that it is the city centre. I think at this point, I'd ask you to identify the city centre with a placemark in Google Earth. I'm going to then identify a few other sites which I will tell you were the city centre in a past life- we'll come back to these.

I'm then going to ask you, still using Google Earth, to look at the wider area of Glasgow and, using the path tool, draw a line around Glasgow where you think the city boundary lies. I'm going to ask you to write up a reason within the description box as to why you think the city stops here-Are there physical boundaries which make further growth difficult, for instance? Send your placemark to me, and then I'll look at the site of Glasgow in a little more detail on the whiteboard. Following on from this, I'd like to look at the growth of Glasgow, and to do this, we are going to have to look at situation, so again, we'll take the zoom out a bit more and add a few layers, such as roads, borders etc. Finally, I'm going to go back to the idea of the changing city centre by looking at the function of Glasgow over the ages through this. I think you should probably use this yourselves and make your own notes from it, but I'm also going to ask for 3 questions from each pair about this by the end of the period to build on your knowledge next lesson.