1Colin, I'm really struggling to think of a topic for our human geography assignment.
2Me too, Rosie.
3I'll tell you what, let's think about the different aspects of human geography
4and see if we can narrow the topic down a bit to help us decide.
5Okay.
6So one aspect is population.
7That would be all about population density and migration and so on.
8Lots of facts and statistics.
9Maybe a bit boring?
10Yeah, but quite straightforward to find on the internet.
11Suppose so.
12How about health?
13I'd never thought about the links between that and geography until Professor Lee gave us that lecture on cholera -
14how in the 19th century, a physician used street plans and plans of water supplies to find the source of a cholera epidemic.
15Yes, fascinating, wasn't it?
16Or we could do something more general like economies.
17So how financial and commercial factors are linked to the physical environment.
18I thought that had been taken off the syllabus for this year.
19Has it?
20I'm not sure...
21but it might be best to avoid it.
22Okay.
23Maybe we could do something on culture.
24We had that lecture about culture and geography last week.
25I didn't get much out of that.
26It was all so general and the lecturer didn't give any useful examples.
27Yeah, I hardly took any notes... it didn't seem worth it.
28Me neither.
29We could focus on poverty.
30That's something that's a global problem.
31The trouble is, Dr Lee was saying, that you have to be careful with some of the figures relating to poverty.
32They're sometimes deliberately manipulated.
33You mean the information gets changed for political reasons?
34That sort of thing, yes.
35So what are we going to do our assignment on?
36I'll tell you what.
37One of the possibilities we haven't discussed is urbanisation
38and now over half the world's population lives in cities.
39That's really important.
40Okay, good idea, Rosie.
41Let's do that.
42I love living in a big city but of course there are problems.
43Things like theft and robbery?
44Yes, but where I come from, that's linked to another more serious issue,
45which is that a lot of people don't have jobs.
46That's getting worse and worse.
47And we also still have quite a lot of people who are homeless,
48though that's not quite so bad as it was.
49It'd be nice to talk about some positive developments,
50like some of the new developments on the outskirts of cities.
51Yeah, they've opened some massive new shopping centres outside my city.
52Yeah, the same with mine,
53but it's meant a lot of the shops in the city centre are closing down.
54But the outskirts are ideal for buildings that need a lot of space, like for conferences.
55They've opened a couple of big ones.
56Yes, we've got some too.
57It'd be nicer to have more facilities for things like football too,
58but that's not happening where I live.
59Same in my area.
60We could include something about developing disused industrial sites.
61It seems like a good idea because you're not doing any harm to the natural environment.
62Yeah, but aren't the buildings architecturally significant?
63Not really.
64And what people forget is that they often used quite dangerous materials, chemicals and things,
65which haven't been properly cleared away, so the whole site has to be made safe.
66Hmm, that can't be cheap.
67And I bet it's often not budgeted for.
68You're right.
69Have you read about Masdar City?
70In Abu Dhabi? Yes.
71It was designed to be a green city, wasn't it?
72That might be a good example of a city which set out to depend entirely on renewable energy.
73Yes we should say something about that.
74It was designed to be totally pedestrianised too, wasn't it?
75With the transport underground.
76Yes and they had big plans for recycling to reduce waste to the lowest possible level.
77But let's stick to talking about power sources.
78Then there's that ecotown in England, Greenhill Abbotts.
79It set out to conform to the usual principles, sustainability and so on.
80A lot of people were against it at first.
81They said the plans were unrealistic.
82I'm not sure how far they've got with it...
83I'll check.
84Right.
85So it looks as if we have a sort of plan...