Las Vegas Geography

2068 Words5 Pages

3. Over the last century and a half, Las Vegas has developed from a tiny town in the desert into a multinational vacation destination. It has done this by focusing on becoming the epitome of entertainment tourism: simply giving people what they want to experience instead of trying to educate or enlighten tourists. The town of Las Vegas was founded in 1855 as a Mormon community. Because of the harsh climate where it was located, it was mostly abandoned relatively quickly, but new life was breathed into it in the early 1900s as a railroad stop between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. One key feature of Las Vegas is that the surrounding area is pretty much a wasteland, so the city has always been innately tied to outside interests coming in and …show more content…

There are many differences which distinguish college towns from other towns of similar size. According to the lecture, college towns are defined as having at least 1,000 students within their city limits, and students must make up at least 20% of the population. These towns are a distinctly American phenomenon, as nowhere else in the world has these sort of urban areas dominated by students (Europe has universities in large cities, Canada has them in provincial capitals, and Latin America has them in megacities). One difference in college towns is their youthfulness. They have a median age of 26 years, which is 10 years less than the national average; also rates of marriage in college towns are much lower due to the younger age. College towns also have a much higher education level than comparable cities; people are 2 times as likely to have a bachelor’s degree, 6 times as likely to have a PhD, and library circulation rates and number of bookstores are higher. College towns also have a higher number of white-collar jobs. There is very little heavy industry in these towns, with a lot of people employed in the service sector, and in some college towns as much as half the labor force can be employed by the university. College towns additionally are relatively affluent and more economically stable than other similar towns. The median family income is about $10,000 a year higher in college towns, and because of economic growth spurred by the university through stable state …show more content…

Megalopolis is a term used to refer to once-separate urban areas which have somewhat coalesced into one giant urban area where it’s hard or impossible to tell where one city ends and the next one starts (Gottmann 1957). This concept has become more and more relevant in recent years as the world trends towards more and more urbanization. 54% of the world’s population today lives in urban areas, and urban spaces provide many different functions for individuals, including places to live, centers of economic activity, a center for culture, and a place for monuments and memorials, among other functions. Urban areas tend to draw people and economic activity (it is easiest to locate new activities near existing ones), and so large cities have a natural tendency to grow even larger. In areas with a high concentration of cities, such as along the northeast coast of the United States, as cities expand, they run into each other, creating megalopolises (lecture). The trend of suburbanization is directly tied to this concept of megalopolis. As the middle class moves outward from the center of the cities (for larger houses, more land, etc.), the creation of suburbs drives the conglomeration of cities into megalopolises. While megalopolises are on the rise however, there do exist several problems with larger cities that might be compounded as they continue to grow larger and larger and closer and closer together. One of these problems is urban decay; as cities continue to expand outward

Open Document