My hometown: Guang Zhou

1 GEOG 1003 Hometown Environmental History Project (Summer class) For this project, you will research the environmental history of your hometown. Your hometown could be the place you spent the most time in, where you identify as home, or a place you feel you know well. (Throughout the assignment I refer to “towns” generically although you may come from a big city or a rural place.) A penultimate draft of the paper is due on the Thursday of the fifth week of class in either Microsoft Word or PDF format. I expect a tightly written eight- or nine-page paper (not including maps, tables, photos, etc.) exploring the environmental history of your hometown, written from your perspective as a resident (and yes, first person is fine). Once I read your paper and provide you with comments, you will have one week to do revisions. The final version of the paper is due on the Thursday of the sixth week of class. Learning objectives of this project include the development of research skills and identification of appropriate sources of information, critical analysis of multiple data sources and integration of class materials, contextualization of your previous experiences of the environment of your hometown, and developing and supporting a cogent and balanced argument. Components of the finished project should include: 1. An overview of the geography and local environmental conditions without humans and/or pre-settlement. This section can be relatively short, perhaps a page to a page and a half of text. You can describe the landscape (for example, it has rolling hills, or is built on a series of inlets), the underlying geology, and/or flora and fauna. Try to make this section as engaging as possible. 2. An analysis of how human habitation has changed the environment over time, from the earliest human settlement to present. This could include descriptions of historical land use and development, agriculture, transportation, industry, etc. Who were the earliest settlers of this region and how did they thrive here? Who came after? Are there legacy land uses such as tanneries or mills that have left an imprint today—either in the form of “disamenities” like brownfields or other remnant landscape elements? This section could be perhaps three pages long depending on what you can document. 3. An assessment of your hometown today. How would you characterize this place in terms of housing styles, neighborhood design, and street patterns? What about demographics? How do residents get to work? Is there room set aside for recreation? Describe the “activity spaces” of typical residents and their uses of the local environment. Reflect on the imprint of the past on the present in terms of land uses, and extrapolate to the future. What does your town look like in 20 | 50 | 100 years? What is the level of awareness among the residents about environmental or sustainability issues? Does your town have a Sustainability Plan, and if so, what are its recommendations? Are there efforts in your town to add parks or open space? This section of the paper could be perhaps three or four pages long. 2 Throughout the research process, you should be thinking about a thesis that drives your paper. While you’re in the process of creating your outline and amassing your sources, think of the biggest take-home point that you want a reader to have about your city’s environmental history. Many students have success by focusing on some geographic feature—location on a river or a coast, on a trade route, or in proximity to a natural resource, which has affected the development trajectory of your hometown. Students from large cities may want to focus on a smaller area such as a neighborhood or section of the city depending on the amount of reference materials available. Students whose hometowns are international might want to investigate the availability of data as soon as possible. High value is placed on developing original sources, especially interviews, site visits, and archival work. Reach out to librarians, historians, and naturalists in your town (and remember they need to go into the source list as well). Make ample use of maps (including locator maps showing where your town is with respect to the state or territory it is in), also photos, sketches, tables, and other graphics are welcome. Enhance the readability of your paper by embedding these graphics in the body of the paper and including captions with a cited source of the information – very important!). You should have at least 10 sources, including at least five scholarly ones (books or peerreviewed journal articles). Websites, newspaper articles, government sources, data tables, photos, interviews, maps – ALL need to be documented and listed. Be scrupulous about giving credit to others for their work. Please use APA formatting (for guidelines, see http://www.library.cornell.edu/resrch/citmanage/apa). This means no footnotes or endnotes but rather in-text citation “(Smith 2014).” Then all cited sources are additionally provided in a source list at the end of the paper. Make your paper as technically perfect as possible: write drafts, proofread, and format your paper carefully and be sure to include page numbers, one-inch margins, double-spacing, and there is no need for a cover sheet or running headers. This project in its entirety comprises 30 percent of your total grade. I am looking for exceptionally insightful, well documented, and polished efforts. Aim for this. I am happy to take a quick look at a draft if you email it to me before the due date, but I need a 48-hour turnaround. You are also encouraged to take your work to the Writing Center (http://www.gwu.edu/~gwriter/) located at Gelman Library for more in-depth help. This is an assignment for a class, but I also hope you treat it as opportunity to get familiar with the geography of your own backyard and apply the learning elsewhere in your life.