Where did the change begin?
Labs / Geography
How Cities Grow
Press play and watch a settlement swell from a founding site at a river crossing into a full city. As the population climbs, the built-up area sorts itself into rings — a dense business core, a band of industry, then homes and suburbs — while land value falls the farther you get from the centre. Hover anywhere on the map to read the zone and land value under your cursor.
Labs / Geography / How Cities Grow
How Cities Grow
Press play and watch a settlement swell from a founding site at a river crossing into a full city. As the population climbs, the built-up area sorts itself into rings — a dense business core, a band of industry, then homes and suburbs — while land value falls the farther you get from the centre. Hover anywhere on the map to read the zone and land value under your cursor.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Geography explains how places, people, and Earth systems affect one another. This model lets you change one factor and watch its effects spread across space.
Explore
Try the model
Year 1800Pop 5 kRadius 0.0 kmLand —Zone —
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Why does the most expensive land end up right at the centre, and not out in the roomy suburbs?
- Turn transport routes on and off. Why does building roads pull the city into a star instead of a neat circle?
- Switch the founding site to the coast. How does having water on one side reshape where the city can grow?
- Crank the growth rate up. Does the city reach its final size sooner, or does it end up bigger?
- Scrub back to 1850 and forward to 2050 — in which decades does the edge of the city move fastest?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Connect the pattern to place: identify where the change begins, where its effects appear, and which process links those locations.
Check
Before you leave
What spatial pattern appeared?
Which process connects the cause and effect?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.