Sustainable Communities

Recently, there has been an initiative by the government to look at the communities we live in and try and make them sustainable. They do this by transforming the area that maybe in need of transformation and make it somewhere that people want to live and stay. For many a parts of the country, they are in need of transforming, especially areas that have been documented in the media, like in documentaries or the news.

This is an example of people in an area of dire need of transforming due to recent events in the past few years:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7878360.stm

For the area I was living for the past 18 and a half years, it has been transformed over the years. It was never really a great place to live, with people who were behaving anti-socialably and crime at a level which was just below the average. But today, it has been transformed into an area where people would like to live. From experience, there are now people who belong in that area and do their upmost to keep it safe and clean for the residents and even visitors of the area.
For the 5 points on which the government think a sustainable community is (to be found here: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/pdf/143600.pdf Page 5), I think that the area that i used to live in ticks all them boxes. It has such great neighbourhood spirit with everyone knowing everyone.

My Area is situated in Ward Peterborough 017C, which there are 1,577 people living in, and the majority are males at 795, but only by about 13 with females at 782. It is a healthy area to live in, with 69.63% of the people living there are in good general health. There are 726 households in the area and the majority of people living there either have 1 or no cars in the household. This can be seen due to the good public transport in the area and since it very close to the town centre. There is also just over half of the amount of people in the area are either single or married, with 760 people being classed as single and 459 being classed as married.
As for crime, there is very little as can be seen with only 3 total fire incidents in the area, which could be crime or could be accidental. For education, 47.4% of all students received 5+ A*-C at GCSE and this is not above the national average, due to the secondary schools being quite far, but from personal experience, many students did not have a problem travelling such a long distance to get to school every day. There is one primary and one infant school in the area which both have a very good record for education, due to experience, and this is reflected from when they move onto KS3/4 where they are not far behind the national average.

Although there are a lot of positive things about the area, there are areas of the ward where improvement is needed, especially with anti-socialable behaviour in a set of council flats which have been a problem for years. The local council has not seemed to grasp this and need to help the people who live there with new inititatives to help boost the local area and bring something back to the community.

(http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/NeighbourhoodSummary.do?width=1280&a=3&r=1&i=1001&m=0&s=1236933577915&enc=1&profileSearchText=PE2+9AN&searchProfiles=Search)

The Education for Sustainable Development

Learning about new things is important to people in every day life. You learn about new aspects of life and be able to deal with them in different ways. Todays life is looking at the pressure we are putting on this planet, and we need to do something about it. Giving an education to the people of this earth about how to deal with what is going on is the best possible measure as we can learn about how to change our lives to make sure that future generations do not suffer at the realm of a collapse of life as we know it.

Talking and learning about Sustainable development is a very good thing. It helps promote more green ideas and helps people lead a better life in the end, knowing that they do not have a bad conscious about how the world may end up if nothing happens to prevent it. We also have to consider the side of which we attract this education to people. We cannot just let people be bored to death with a guy just rambling on about how to recycle our waste, we need to get people active about this and get an idea of what we should do and how we should do it. Getting people of a young age to know about this is better as it prepares them for th challenges ahead in life. It might put more on their plate at the end of the day but better now than never.

Geography is about how the world is in its many shapes and forms and what processes there are etc and placing Sustainable development within this combines the learning of Geography with the learning of how to deal with our everyday lives and how to change it. Im currently doing a Module on Sustainable Development, and as a Geographer, i love it, because i get to know what other ideas i can do to make sure that my future and everyone elses future is safe on this planet. I also get to combine it with learning how things change if nothing happens and also spread the ideas of what i have learnt to other people and get them started.

Sustainable Development is a great idea in the form of learning about different aspects of life and how they are affecting the world as we know it. We get to learn about what is happening now and what other parts of the world are doing to deal with it, whilst we also get to know about the local communities and cities and how this country as a whole is dealing with the idea. Its not just about the environment, we also have to look at the economy and the social side of things, and learning about that interests me. It gives me ideas to spread about and make sure that people live a life that can be sustainable and also user friendly to the society that we live in.

Bad Crunch Good Crunch?

The recession has hit us all. The global spectrum as we know it is starting to fall beneath us but doesnt mean that everything has to come to a halt. The car industry has recently been in the news with job losses and less production of cars, due to new car sales plummeting. But other things like interest rates being cut and that are affecting us, but this is good for the environment right?

Well, with the reduction in production going on, this means there is a lot less waste, and with less waste, more of Britain's green grass is saved from the dreaded Landfill Monster that people have the mishap of seeing if they live near one. Recycling has become a big thing nowadays so new products can be formed from old and this is good as less is ruining the environment and people will be generally happy.

But recently at the end of the last year, there was a news report within my area talking about how recyclable waste is being stored in warehouses as it cannot be recycled fast enough. This got me thinking about how much waste we produce and how big the resources are, surely we can cope?

So during these hard times, there are pros and cons to the depression, but with regards to the environment, it seems good for it, with the waste industry being good on the recycling and keeping new things coming and old being transformed and less waste being produced in the first place.

Traffic Survey

Our next assignment for our module on Learning for Sustainable Development was to look at the Green Travel Plan at the university. This is kinda interesting as it gives us the chance to see what people think of other means of transport and what the uni should do about it. So a questionnaire and a travel survey were in order, to gather the data about what people thought and how many people came into the uni in their private vehicles.

The morning was crisp and dull, but didnt stop me and my partner, counting how many people were in each car and mar them down. It was fun, yet cold, but that didnt stop me counting and commenting on the recent climate and the pros and cons of travelling with only one person. It was relatively easy to calculate the number of people in a car but it would be better if we got a better day since it was raining but maybe go one step further and compare the data that the university collected to what we collected.