Chapter 20

Chapter 20

It started with the first communities, they were constantly on the move because their food would run out. But then the first communities learned how to store their food, learning horticulture. With horticulture the land was able to support more people and with this other communities developed and became more diverse.  The only thing about horticulture is that it took a lot of labor to produce.  

The communities refined irrigation and invented plowing and use of animals for transportation and farming.  These advances created surplus and freed the people from agriculture.  The communities grew into cities.  

Rome was a large urban area with an estimated 500,000+ people, but it decreased when wars and plagues took the land and the people.  After the wars food surplus increased.  Each urban area was specialized and created institutions: churches, shops, marketplaces, and city halls.  

With the Industrial Revolution cities grew rapidly and eventually changed Western Europe and the United States.  Cities grew into centers of commerce and production but they were still places of poverty and disease.  This led to poverty, lack of adequate living space, poor garbage disposal and sewage.  Riot started to break and workers went on strike.  

Then there were Developing World countries that gave colonial control too the local governments of the colonies they had created.  Then came the squatters, they would settle along railroads, highways and banks of streams.  Squatters helped solve the problems of housing shortage and had access to jobs and services in the city.   The solution to the squatters were to put them in housing outside the central city but have them work, relocating them.  

In the United States we had the Industrial Revolution and people moved to the cities because the number of jobs were increasing that were nonagricultural.  

Slums are described as a place that is overcrowded  and parts of a place that is marked by poverty and poor living conditions, which lead to disease, sickness, and health hazards.  Some of us look at a certain type of person and automatically assume they must live or have been raised in the slums or the ghettos.  When we see women who have large families or tons of kids and perhaps even some elderly and addicts; we see them and put them into category simply on what we see and what we relate to what we've seen else where. 

The ghetto is described as an area where people are forced to live segregated.  A ghetto area traps minorities and puts into controls an area in which they live, to not populate the cities.  The ghetto is known for its violence, drug, young unwed mothers, and other social and economic problems.  There is a higher number of high school dropouts in ghetto areas.  A ghetto area can also be defined by a high crime rate and sadly to say but some even define it by the number of blacks or African Americans living in a certain area.