CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS IN THE CONSTRUCTIVE GEOGRAPHY OF LARGE CITIES

The increasing impact of urbanization on the natural environment and physical constraints on city planning in the various natural zones of the USSR call for a program of research that would bring to bear the tools of the various geographical disciplines on the problem and might give rise to a distinctive geography of city planning. Geomorphology might be concerned with a variety of caving and slumping processes typical of large cities; climatology with the impact of cities on the microclimate of an area; hydrology with watertable changes and water-management problems, and biogeography with the distinctive plant and animal life of large cities and urban agglomerations. More complex, integrated research in both physical and economic geography would deal with the choice of suitable sites for new cities, particularly in extreme types of environment; with predictive aspects of the impact of urbanization, and the functional structure of cities. A number of cities and parts of cities with different layouts and different environmental settings should be designated as experimental study areas for geographical research of a more systematic character.