Week 11 Lab Report

Steffen Seamon and Simon Cohen

Lab Group: Steffen Seamon, Simon Cohen

Date of Inquiry: 11-15-18

_ocene Lab Week 11

Background

We have chosen to examine how intense urbanization has shaped the relationship between people and their environments in the modern day. Our project is situated in Japan, as it is a country both of us are eager to learn more about. Urbanization affects climate, how we interact with animals, food structures, pollution, and a plethora of other environmental subjects. Japan has a few major cities where urbanization can be studied at depth. Our draft framing question is: What are the resulting environmental consequences from urbanization? Our focus question is: What are some resulting environmental consequences from urbanization over the last century in Japan? Our questions are pretty similar. As we do more research on our situated context, we will be able to make our focus question more specific.

Procedure

We used a few databases, such as Google Scholar and Academic Search Premier, to find articles related to our topic. To find framing sources, we searched for terms like “urbanization, urban planning, green architecture, etc.” To find focus sources we searched similar terms, but added “Japan” to the search to get more specific results. We used Zotero to catalog all of our sources and add annotations to them.

Results

Our 21 sources are housed in this group Zotero library. Framing sources, like the ones by Jari Niemelä and Julian Hun et al., establish how cities shape modern ecology. One of our key focus sources is The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty First Century by André Sorensen. This source captures the history of urban Japan, which is the situated context we are researching. Spiritual robots: Religion and Our Scientific View of the Natural World by Robert M. Geraci is neither a framing or focus source. We thought it may be helpful in understanding Japanese values toward technology, which is not the direct subject of our project.

Discussion

Japan was forced to urbanize to catch up with other industrial countries in the post Second World War climate. The dramatic shift of urban/rural stratification led to unforeseen consequences on their national environment. Throughout history, Japanese people have placed great cultural importance on symbols in the natural world. Urban landscapes have the potential to effect these symbols. Other implications, such as urban planning and sustainable infrastructure, are representative of a synthesis between traditional values and the need for industrialization. As we found in our preliminary research, this balance between traditionalism and industrialization is difficult to maintain in the modern age. Many of our sources touched on unique elements (e.g. green architecture, satoyama ecosystems, etc.), further scholarship can elaborate on these topics. Our goal is to discover how built environments in Japan wrestle with maintaining tradition and industry.