Informality

Instructions

This week is different. You will work in Word, write your answers and include the images described below where appropriate. You will then upload the Word doc to Canvas. You will not take a quiz. You will upload a Word document with your answers from below. USE HEADINGS IN YOUR DOCUMENT TO DISTINGUISH EACH QUESTION.

Task: Identifying slums with satellite imagery

Note

With all of the below: try your best, but I understand the images / etc., won’t be perfect.

Go to Google Earth and in the search box look for the capital or a big city in the country you’ve been following all quarter. In the bottom right, click the 3D button to turn on 3D viewing mode. Now, spend some time looking through the city…

  1. Can you find rich and poor communities (e.g., slums) in the images1? Provide one screenshot of each. What are the characteristics of those neighborhoods? Describe them as best you can.

  2. How big are these neighborhoods, and how far are they from one another? Use the “add path or polygon” tool to draw a polygon around the community, which will give you an estimate of the area. Use the ruler tool to measure how far they are from one another.

Now go to Google Earth Engine2 and in the search box look for the same city as before. Zoom in a bit on your city and watch the city grow over time. Click through the time slider to move through 10 years of images (or however much is available).

  1. Can you observe the evolution of neighborhoods through time3? Describe your overall sense of how the spatial character of the city has changed and how your rich and poor neighborhoods from the bullet point above have changed. Provide two screenshots to help support your claims.

Footnotes

  1. Note that Google might be able to help you with the names of particularly posh and poor neighborhoods, if you’re having trouble finding them.↩︎

  2. Time-lapse used to be on Google Earth, but now they’ve moved it to Google Earth Pro (the Destkop app).↩︎

  3. if not, check the edges of the city!↩︎