6.4+Urban+land+use+functions

6.4 How and why is urban land use functions divided up?

Land use is general term with a somewhat obvious meaning. It is what the land is used for – by humans. That is, humans take the natural environment and change it for their own purposes. These uses include residential, institutional, business, industrial, agricultural, forestry, and parks among others. These broad categories can be subdivided. For example residential land use can involve single-family dwellings on large or small plots, or large groups on estates of semi-detached or terraced houses. The most intensive residential land-uses are found in large blocks of flats where the population density can be very high. Institutional land uses are mostly occupied by public buildings such as schools, universities, government office buildings, art galleries, and museums and hospitals. These facilities are most commonly located in urban or suburban areas. [[|Case Study of Reading Land Uses & Enthincity for Google Earth]] How is the land used in urban areas? Go to any town or city and there is an area towards the centre, usually right in the middle, where you will find a scene like this: It is of Sheffield but it could be just about anywhere. What do you notice about the sky line? From what you already know why is this? What kind of activities are carried on here? It is also likely to be the place where roads from different places meet. If there is still a railway, then the main line station will not be far away. There may be a bus terminal, where many buses from elsewhere in the area stop and turn around. This known as the Central Business District or CBD for short.

In many towns, just beyond the limits of the CBD you will find several streets of terraces houses that open straight onto the road.

This picture from the 1950s of Atherton in Lancashire shows the houses, and also other features of the area just outside the CBD, that have either gone away or been changed for other uses. The cotton mill is on the skyline, with the gasworks in front of it. In those days gas was made from ’cooking’ coal to produce coke – which was used in the steel industry and was a cheap fuel for some domestics stoves – and also gas that was used for some street lighting and for cooking and heating in a lot of houses. In the far distance, was a coal mine – closed long ago? As mentioned, many of the houses in the 1950s still had outside toilets and had a tin bath hung on the wall all week and brought down on Saturdays for the weekly clean in front of the fire! You will not find the many factories in this area around the CBD any more, but there are many streets of small Victorian terrace houses still there. Some have been renovated and turned into bijou residences with a large price tag. But many still remain – with an inside loo and bathroom – but substantially the same and are rented out to students and migrant workers and a few local families. But why is there a concentration of cheap housing in so many different urban areas? Think when they were built. In the Victorian era in particular in the United Kingdom but in other parts of Europe and North America, factories were growing up all over the place. They were still powered by steam engines that used coal to boil the water. The coal either needed to be local or brought in by train – the railway station was near the middle of the urban area. It was bulky and there were no lorries to bring it from the station, so the shorter the distance to the factory the better. Then of course the railway was the main way of sending finished goods to other towns and cities. These factories grew up where the raw materials and the coal were easily available but these places were often had a shortage of labour. So cheap housing was needed to be provided for people migrating from the country. There was no cheap and easy local transport system, so the workers had to walk to work. So the factory owners built the housing crammed around the factory both for cheapness and for the ease of the workers getting to the factory. These areas close to the factories were smokey and dirty and not very good places to live. There was no space to grass or trees and no parks. The streets were narrow and it was dark and crowded.

Once the factory had started up, there would be more money in the town and the shops in the CBD would be selling more and the shop keepers doing better. They and the factory foremen and supervisors would form part of an emerging middle class that would need somewhere to live. So the landowners around the edge of the inner area would build houses to sell to this new group – semi-detached villas were wanted, mainly to rent, by the new middle class. They would not want to be too far from the centre to walk to the town centre where they worked but the roads were wider. Each house had a small front garden and usually a larger back garden – no yard for them with a petty at the bottom! Notice the Bay windows? This was a common feature of the foreman’s house. They were far enough away not to get the smells and pollution from the factories and so much healthier. The roads of semi-detached houses often still today spread out quite a long way, but the further you are from the centre, the smarter they got and the further they were from the road. These would be for shop owners perhaps or factory managers. Note the top floor with small windows – a live-in maid or 2 perhaps? Further out still, there would factory owners and other seriously rich people lived with lots of servants and gardeners, and probably carriage and coachman.

Geographical models and urban areas [[image:6.4G_Burgess.png align="right"]]
This was such a common pattern of urban development that in 1925 a man called Ernest Burgess, having studied Chicago in the USA in great depth came up with one of the first urban geographical model based on these concentric rings. It was a very simple idea but it fell out of favour after WW2 because geographers thought it was too simple. It worked fine until roads and road transport imprinted their impression on our cities. It also took no account of electricity taking over as the main power supply, nor did the new industries, such as food processing and small domestic machine for example, fit into the pattern at all.

This problem was to an extend over come by Herman Hoyt who used the idea that the factories tended to be built along roads, railways and rivers in wedges to make the most of the transport routes. The low class residential housing was built alongside it and the high class housing would tend to choose the nicest parts, leaving the middle class housing to do its best to keep away from the factory smells and pollution.

These patterns do seem to have some validity but the most important issue is that different kinds of residential and industrial and commercial land use do separate themselves out into different parts of an urban area. A really up-market house will not be built in the middle of blocks of flats or a row of terraces, any more than a big store is built in the middle of a housing estate. In addition, there are new sorts of urban land use not taken into account by either Burgess or Hoyt. The out-of -town shopping centre and business park are examples. The CBD is crowded and if you want to create a new building for a store there you have a number of problems. Parking is in short supply and therefore expensive. The land is expensive. It is already occupied by buildings and even if you could buy one up, before you could make your new development, you would have to clear the site, while nor damaging the surrounding businesses, which add hugely to the cost. Much better to find a piece of underused land on a major road outside the town, provided free parking, and build your new store on one or at most 2 floors – not the 4 or even 5 floors you would have had to build in the CBD. Similarly it is the same for new industries. To build in the old industrial areas, you would have to clear the ground, and often that would mean decontaminating it before you could lay a single brick, all at a huge cost. The narrow streets in these older areas would making access for delivery lorries difficult too. It was much better to build outside the urban area on a main road. Recently, the narrow approach streets in urban areas have caused traffic chaos. It is all very well for vehicles who are visiting the town, but if the urban area is on a through-route to somewhere else, it can become impossible, especially if large heavy lorries go that way regularly. One solution has been to build by-passes around congested areas. Once the by-pass is in place, superstores and small industrial parks are keen to develop the land either side, as the transport links are so good and there is plenty of space at a much lower cost that in the urban centre. Often there is unused land between the old urban area and the by-pass, which in the last 20 years has rapidly become filled in with large housing estates with medium to high density housing – terraces and semi-detached houses with the smallest of gardens, with developer getting in as many units as the planning authority will allow. However, in recent times, these plans seemed to have slowed to a stop due to the credit crunch which has affected the building trade particularly badly.

But why do similar land-use function group together in urban area?
The CBD is where you find the shops, offices, banks, administrative building and so on. These organisations all want to be within easy reach of the whole urban area and also those coming in from outside. This means being at the junction of the main transport routes and as close to the centre as possible. They can afford to pay the higher land prices and so squeeze other potential users out. One way to make the higher prices achievable is to build up and so cram a lot into a small area. The old industrial area, around the CBD, has almost disappeared in some towns. But many still have pockets of small workshops, like car-repair, body shops (for fixing and re-spraying cars!), and general engineering operating in run-down areas, underneath railway arches for example. Why are they there? They have been there for a long time. They are noisy and dirty but being out of the way, they do not upset anyone. No-one can think of anything more profitable to do with the land. We have already talked about industrial estates and commercial centres on the roads going out of town or on a ring road. It is obviously why these sites are good for them but building houses immediately near a by-pass would not be attractive – noise, danger of fast cars, pollution etc would not make these areas appealing to residents. We have established that residential land-use can be sub-divided into low, middle and high class housing and have looked at some of the early reasons for the different types of housing being located in different places. In the next section we will go into that in more detail.

HOUSING (AGE/TYPE, OWNERSHIP/APPEARANCE)
1. The zone between CBD and suburbs 2. Grew during industrial revolution. 3. Factories built on edges of historic towns, mostly alongside rivers, canals or roadways. 4. High density terraced, 2 up 2 down back-to-back houses built to accommodate workers moving from the countryside. 5. Today, many have been enlarged by extensions to provide bathroom and kitchens. 6. Factory owners and wealthy business people also lived in the more desirable areas of the inner city - but in larger 3/4 storey terraces including basements and attic rooms where the servants would live.

ROAD PATTERN
1. Built in long straight rows/parallel roads. 2. Grid layout, narrow roads and pavements. 3. No gardens or garages - on street parking.

LAND-USE
1. Most of the land is used for housing. 2. Houses built around and in-between factories.

AMENITIES (HOUSEHOLD/NEIGHBOURHOOD)
1. Housing cheap, often poor quality, quickly built; no proper kitchens, bathrooms or central heating (outside toilet). 2. Local services catered for the needs of the people, including corner shops, schools, public houses, churches, libraries and parks.

ADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Cheap to acquire. 2. Available for rent - accessible for immigrants/the low paid or unemployed. 3. Some areas improved substantially/large profits made in last 30 years - gentrification). 4. Near to city centre - places of employment, shops, entertainment and leisure.  5. Developed a strong sense of community (doors open directly onto streets).

DISADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Old, decaying houses. 2. Surrounded by derelict land when traditional industries declined and factories closed (sunset industry e.g. steel, shipbuilding). 3. High levels of graffiti and vandalism. 4. Traffic congestion - problems of "rat- runs" - danger on roads. 5. Lack of open space. 6. Above average concentration of pensioners, lone-parents, ethnic minorities and students - poverty/low income levels, unemployment (often above 50% for males). 7. High levels of disease, illness and over-crowding. 8. Rising crime rates, poor police and community relations; riots in 1980's - Brixton (London), Toxteth (Liverpool) and Handsworth (Birmingham).

HOUSING (AGE/TYPE, OWNERSHIP/APPEARANCE
1. High rise flats, maisonettes and semi-detached houses built in 1960's by local authorities to re-house people from the demolished terraces (an example of urban redevelopment or regeneration). 2. New houses/flats housed people at a lower density, the overspill population moved to newly built (and often large) outer-city council estates e.g. Castle Vale. 3. More recent modern houses built by private builders in varied styles, sizes and prices. 4. Some are aimed at first time buyers "starter homes", while "executive" apartments have been built in prestigious locations ( e.g. river/canal sides - Canary Wharf in London and Brindley Place in Birmingham) in an attempt to diversify the social structure of the inner city. 5. In the 1970's the "knock it all down and start again" approach was abandoned, many cities had gradually become empty (roads, shops, offices replacing houses as the CBD and infrastructure expanded) developing a "dead heart". Instead existing buildings were improved with tenements being combined to provide bathrooms, kitchens, more bedrooms, double glazing, new roofs, cavity wall insulation, central heating and were re-wired throughout. A process of renovation called urban renewal.

ROAD PATTERN
1. Ring roads kept traffic away from the houses, cul-de sacs and garages were constructed. 2. Roads were curved.

LAND-USE
1. Large areas of open space were created around tower blocks - communal. 2. Industrial estates were built away from housing areas with access to main roads (found difficulty attracting businesses).

AMENITIES (HOUSEHOLD/NEIGHBOURHOOD)
1. Areas for worship were built along with shops, play areas (quickly vandalised), new schools, public houses, sports facilities. 2. Modern facilities were included in the new developments/renovation schemes (see above). 3. Quality of materials used in the tower blocks meant that they were cold, poorly insulated and prone to condensation. In the Gorbals area of Glasgow two tower blocks were renovated to produce Japanese pagoda-style roofs in blue aluminium with blue and grey panelling bolted on top of the concrete (cheaper than the cost of building 112 new homes from scratch).

ADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Tower blocks were cheaper to build and therefore rent. Save valuable space for other uses e.g. roads, office and shop developments. 2. Near to city centre - places of work/shops/entertainment/leisure. 3. People stayed in the area they grew up in. 4. Better amenities than original houses.

DISADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Inhuman conditions gave a lack of neighbourliness - elderly felt trapped (muggings in dark passageways). 2. Lack of play areas and amenities for youngsters. 3. Poor quality of the buildings - one tower block in London (Ronan Point) actually collapsed. 4. Areas still had a high density of population and above average levels of poverty and unemployment

HOUSING (AGE/TYPE, OWNERSHIP/APPEARANCE)
1. Cities expanded as rural-urban migration continued and the death rate fell leading to a natural population increase. 2. Development of mass transport systems - trams, buses and commuter trains. 3. Inter-war housing typically consisted of semi-detached houses with bay windows, few had garages (car ownership was unusual), front and back gardens. Some of the housing was in estates, some on main roads as examples of ribbon development. 4. More recent housing has a greater variety of styles and designs. Some large private estates have been built (e.g. Longbridge), while smaller patches of land have been used for in-fill housing. 5. The 1990's saw an increase in the building of expensive (£250 000 +) executive-type housing. These estates are well-planned, spacious and less uniform in their layout. 6. The inter war period saw the massive urban sprawl which led to a loss of countryside and eventually the creation of green belts after World War Two.

ROAD PATTERN
More varied patterns, cul-de sacs used to reduce exits for thieves and to increase community development.

LAND-USE
1. Most of the land given over to houses with local shopping precincts/high streets on the arterial main roads e,g, Kings Heath in Birmingham.

AMENITIES (HOUSEHOLD/NEIGHBOURHOOD
2. Houses were built with modern amenities - double glazed, burglar alarms, studies/utility 3. rooms, garages and gardens. 4. Connections for dishwashers, washing machines, en-suite bedrooms were built in the later developments. 5. Parks, schools and sport amenities were built e.g. Golf Courses, Leisure Centres, Swimming Pools.

ADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Larger (lower cost of land) and better quality houses, garages built at lower density. 2. Best performing schools are located in the "outer rim". 3. Less traffic congestion and pollution than the inner city. 4. Closer to the countryside. 5. Close enough to the CBD to commute by car or train. Access to the national motorway system.

DISADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Long commuting travel times with attendant dangers on the road - risk of accidents and being late for work. 2. Higher costs of journey to work. 3. High cost of housing (negative equity in the late 80's/early 90's as house prices fell). 4. Sense of community is diminished as people spend little time at home, separated by fences and hedges. 5. Distance from CBD for shopping and leisure/entertainment. 6. Rising number of burglaries.

HOUSING (AGE/TYPE, OWNERSHIP/APPEARANCE)
1. In the 1960's council houses were built on the fringes of the suburbs (to receive overspill population from inner cities/cope with natural population increase). 2. More varied size and type of accommodation was constructed with single storey terraces, 2/3 storey maisonettes, high rise blocks and often had free-standing garages and more communal open space e.g. in Castle Vale.

ROAD PATTERN
1. Varied patterns, often geometrically shaped. 2. Industrial estates/factories separated from houses.

LAND-USE
1. Most of the land is given over to houses. 2. Local shopping precincts were built together with leisure centres, public houses, clinics, schools, parks and libraries.

AMENITIES (HOUSEHOLD/NEIGHBOURHOOD)
1. Houses built with modern amenities (bathrooms and separate kitchens), garages, gardens and communal open spaces. 2. Local shopping precincts, public houses, libraries and schools catered for the residents

ADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Modern amenities (bathrooms, kitchens, garages). 2. Less pollution, congestion. 3. Closer to the countryside.

DISADVANTAGES OF LIVING HERE
1. Insufficient, local jobs were provided/attracted. 2. Long distance from the CBD (the main source of employment/shopping, entertainment). 3. Lack of amenities for young children and teenagers.