Estimated time: 40–60 minutes. Includes the activity and its built-in responses. Extra assignments may take longer.
Human geography in action - rebuilt
Transportation makes land accessible. Growth makes choices irreversible. Can Colorado Springs add homes without paving over the geography that made people want to live there?
Colorado Springs did not expand across an empty, featureless sheet. Roads, mountains, military land, and developable prairie gave growth a direction.
The urban shapes are teaching reconstructions, not parcel-accurate historical boundaries. The geographic constraints and transportation corridors are real.
Which force best explains why later growth moved north and especially east?
The original planners compared five ways to add the same 72,000 homes. That control matters: it prevents "build nothing" from quietly winning every environmental category.
Cluster homes, shops, and employment in several walkable centers outside downtown.
Density, land conversion, and water/sewer estimates reproduce the original controlled scenario comparison in approximate year-2000 dollars. They are historical teaching estimates, not bids for present projects.
A useful model should survive a change of place, but it should not survive unchanged. Transfer your preferred scenario from a linear mountain-front city to the ring-and-radial Twin Cities.
Dominant geometry: a north-south urban corridor pressed against the Rockies.
Special constraints: scarce water, foothill habitat, wildfire exposure, federal and military land.
Dominant geometry: two cores, radial highways, and a circumferential freeway ring.
Special constraints: wetlands, lakes, high-quality farmland, fragmented municipalities, and sewer-service boundaries.
The seven-county Twin Cities region is forecast to gain about 657,000 residents from 2020 to 2050. Apply one Colorado Springs strategy and predict what changes.
| Question | Colorado Springs | Twin Cities |
|---|---|---|
| What directs growth? | Mountain barrier plus I-25 and eastern roads | Two downtowns, ring roads, radials, and sewer service |
| What land is at risk? | Prairie, foothills, riparian habitat | Wetlands, lakesheds, forests, and farmland |
| Who coordinates? | Many local governments plus state transportation and water institutions | Local governments plus a seven-county regional council for land use, transit, sewers, and parks |
| What can the model hide? | Water rights, wildfire, military land, and unequal exposure | Municipal tax competition, racial inequality, displacement, and uneven transit access |
Select three people for a citizens committee. The best technical score may not be the proposal a real coalition can accept.
Selected members
Notes in this activity are temporary. Copy any work you need, and submit assigned responses in Canvas or D2L.
A sophisticated answer names the preferred pattern, the tradeoff it accepts, and the forces the model failed to include.
Check at least four forces that could overturn a neat scenario ranking.