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Planning came into place largely when we started to have the sort of infrastructure that made it necessary, so relatively recently. There was no one time in history that all nations of the world started to require planning permissions, although many cities were developed according to someones idea of the ideal. Most ancient cities grew from settlements around a geographical feature/s to support human life, this could be access to water, a food source, transport (river or sea), nearby building materials, safety. They rarely started as cities, but grew into them. Ancient cities were almost never planned from their inception, although 2000 years ago the Romans were pretty organised about where they chose to settle, favouring places with easy access, a water source, fertile land, accessible building materials, local labour and usually on raised ground (the top of a hill) so that they had clear vision of the surrounding countryside and possible invaders. With these resources available they planned comfortable settlements with the ‘mod cons’ to which they were accustomed (baths, heating, running water) for their own, but accommodation for the peasantry was not given the same consideration - so their cities as a whole were not comprehensively planned. Most really old cities started as unplanned but subsequently had planning imposed on them - cities like London, Rome and Paris. If you are looking for the worlds oldest cities without planning then you need simply to look for the oldest cities in the world - even these will, in todays world, have had planning imposed as they expand.What is the oldest city in the world? (The Guardian Newspaper)So much rubble and ruin ... Aleppo, Syria, one of the oldest cities, shown before the civil war. Photograph: Joel Carillet/GettyMark Twain declared that the Indian city of Varanasi was ‘older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend’. He was, of course, wrong. So which exactly is the world’s most ancient continuously inhabited city?There was once a city called Crocodilopolis, where they worshiped the crocodile god Sobek. The people of Crocodilopolis paid devotion to an earthly representative of Sobek, a living crocodile they called Petsuchos and covered in gold and gems and kept in a temple, though it is unclear how they did this without loss of life or limb. When one Petsuchos died, they simply replaced him with another, like a fairground goldfish.Crocodilopolis was established on the Nile, southwest of Memphis, about 4,000BC. The Egyptians called it Shedet (it was the Greeks who, wise to the city’s USP, gave it its snappy name), and it was possibly the most ancient city in ancient Egypt. It is now part of the modern city of Faiyum – which makes Faiyum possibly the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.But only possibly. Beyond the easy task of immediately discounting every city in North America and Australasia, identifying the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city is an uncertain business. There is a mess of claim and counterclaim, myth and legend, architectural digs and disputed evidence.One reason for the stickiness of this subject is the whole matter of deciding when a settlement becomes a city at all – some argue when it abandons simple self-sufficiency and establishes trade, others when it develops plumbing. There is also a long-running spat in academic circles about whether cities could predate agriculture.The ancient Roman theatre (built sometime between AD114-117) in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Photograph: De Agostini/W Buss/GettyBut even among places that are undisputedly cities, the claimants stretch from Varanasi, India to Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Varanasi (once known as Benares) can count Mark Twain in its corner – “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together,” Twain said – but its claim seems to rest on the legend that it was established by Lord Shiva in 3,000BC, while all the actual evidence suggests it was founded on the Ganges 2,000 years later. Plovdiv, meanwhile, has a far stronger case, with evidence of continuous settlement dating back to 6,000BC.But it is the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent that is the most, well, fertile area for antique urbanity. Not that this makes the job of firmly planting a flag on the oldest city any easier. Cities in this region have not shouted their claims, or investigated them, or tried to trade them for the tourist dollar, as energetically as have the big hitters in ancient city fame, such as Rome, Athens or even Cirencester.Iraq for instance has Kirkuk, once the ancient Assyrian capital of Arrapha, founded around 2,200BC, and with the ruins of a 5,000-year-old castle to prove its bona fides. Then there is nearby Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, which claims settlements dating back to 6,000BC.Iran meanwhile has Susa, now the delightfully named Shush, administrative centre of Shush Country, which has an acropolis – a sure sign of ancient city status – that is carbon-dated to around 4,200BC, and evidence of permanent homemaking going back another 800 years. Susa’s claims are somewhat dented, however, by the fact that it was downgraded to “small settlement” between the 15th and 20th centuries.Jerusalem and Beirut can both claim urbanisation going back to at least 3,000 BC, as can Jericho in the West Bank. Indeed, archeologists have found evidence of 20 successive settlements in Jericho dating back as far as 9,000BC. And they were already building walls around their proto-city: serious 12ft high, 6ft wide walls, a remarkable and unprecedented feat of defensive architecture. Jericho, as the Bible tells us, developed a thing about walls. The city later became a private estate for Alexander the Great, and Herod – that Herod – leased it from Cleopatra, who had been given it by Mark Anthony as a gift. What else do you give the woman who has everything?Again, though, Jericho has a tenuous grip on the “continuously inhabited” tag, having been largely abandoned for centuries on end. Byblos, a once groovy Mediterranean resort in Lebanon, is possibly the first Phoenician city, founded in 7000BC – not as old as Jericho, maybe, but at least it can claim continuous habitation since 5,000 BC.Damascus was once a (largely) undisputed shoo-in for oldest city. It was name-checked in Genesis, and there is evidence of settlement going back to 9,000BC. Unfortunately, there is no clear evidence of meaningful activity in what is now Damascus proper until the 2nd millennium BC – a bit like West Bromwich arriving seven centuries before Birmingham. (Herod, by the way, may also have been gifted Damascus. He was clearly doing something right.)Ironically, it is not Damascus but Aleppo, poor, benighted Aleppo, which is actually Syria’s largest city and was once a mighty rival to Cairo and Constantinople, that has a far stronger case for being the world’s oldest city. The evidence of settlement goes back to 6,000BC, but excavations north of the city suggest wandering nomads made domestic camps here 5,000 years before that.Written records show that Aleppo was an important city long before Damascus. It is really only since the opening of the Suez Canal that Aleppo has declined as a major trading city. Until the recent civil war, there had been serious efforts to preserve the citadel, which dates back to the first century BC, as well as Aleppo’s mosques and its medieval hammams and souks. All that has now gone up in smoke, and Aleppo’s old city is so much rubble and ruin. It may be impossible to say with any certainty what is the world’s oldest city – for a very old argument, it is remarkably fluid, with new discoveries all the time – but for now it seems only right to give it to Aleppo, the oldest city currently being fought for and sacked, as all these cities have from the beginning.History of urban planningFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThis article delineates the history of urban planning, a technical and political process concerned with the use of land and design of the urban environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas such as transportation and distribution networks.The history of urban planning runs parallel to the history of the city, as planning is in evidence at some of the earliest known urban sites.Pre-classicalThe pre-Classical and Classical periods saw a number of cities laid out according to fixed plans, though many tended to develop organically. Designed cities were characteristic of the Minoan, Mesopotamian, Harrapan, and Egyptian civilisations of the third millennium BC (see Urban planning in ancient Egypt). The first recorded description of urban planning appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh: "Go up on to the wall of Uruk and walk around. Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinise the brickwork. Testify that its bricks are baked bricks, And that the Seven Counsellors must have laid its foundations. One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is claypits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar's temple.Three square miles and the open ground comprise Uruk. Look for the copper tablet-box, Undo its bronze lock, Open the door to its secret, Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read." [1]Distinct characteristics of urban planning from remains of the cities of Harappa, Lothal, Dholavira, and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley Civilisation (in modern-day northwestern India and Pakistan) lead archeologists to interpret them as the earliest known examples of deliberately planned and managed cities.[2][3] The streets of many of these early cities were paved and laid out at right angles in a grid pattern, with a hierarchy of streets from major boulevards to residential alleys. Archaeological evidence suggests that many Harrapan houses were laid out to protect from noise and to enhance residential privacy; many also had their own water wells, probably both for sanitary and for ritual purposes. These ancient cities were unique in that they often had drainage systems, seemingly tied to a well-developed ideal of urban sanitation.[2] Cities laid out on the grid plan could have been an outgrowth of agriculture based on rectangular fields.[4]Many Central American civilisations also planned their cities, including sewage systems and running water. In Mexico, Tenochtitlan, built on an island in Lake Texcoco in the present-day Mexico City in central Mexico, served as the capital of the Aztec empire. At its height, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world, with over 200,000 inhabitants.[5]ChinaChina has a tradition of urban planning dating back thousands of years.Greco-Roman empiresMap of Pella, showing the grid plan of the cityTraditionally, the Greek philosopher Hippodamus (5th century BC) is regarded as the first town planner and ‘inventor’ of the orthogonal urban layout. Aristotle called him "the father of city planning",[6] and until well into the 20th century, he was indeed regarded as such. This is, however, only partly justified. The Hippodamian plan that was called after him, is an orthogonal urban layout with more or less square street blocks. Archaeological finds from ancient Egypt—among others—demonstrate that Hippodamus cannot truly have been the inventor of this layout.[7] Aristotle's critique and indeed ridicule of Hippodamus, which appears in Politics 2. 8, is perhaps the first known example of a criticism of urban planning.From about the late 8th century on, Greek city-states started to found colonies along the coasts of the Mediterranean, which were centred on newly created towns and cities with more or less regular orthogonal plans. Gradually, the new layouts became more regular.[8] After the city of Miletus was destroyed by the Persians in 494 BC, it was rebuilt in a regular form that, according to tradition, was determined by the ideas of Hippodamus of Miletus.[9] Regular orthogonal plans particularly appear to have been laid out for new colonial cities and cities that were rebuilt in a short period of time after destruction.Following in the tradition of Hippodamus about a century later, Alexander commissioned the architect Dinocrates to lay out his new city of Alexandria, the grandest example of idealised urban planning of the ancient Hellenistic world, where the city's regularity was facilitated by its level site near a mouth of the Nile.The ancient Romans also employed regular orthogonal structures on which they molded their colonies.[10] They probably were inspired by Greek and Hellenic examples, as well as by regularly planned cities that were built by the Etruscans in Italy.[11] (See Marzabotto.) The Roman engineer Vitruvius established principles of good design whose influence is still felt today.[12]The Romans used a consolidated scheme for city planning, developed for civil convenience. The basic plan consisted of a central forum with city services, surrounded by a compact, rectilinear grid of streets. A river sometimes flowed near or through the city, providing water, transport, and sewage disposal.[13] Hundreds of towns and cities were built by the Romans throughout their empire. Many European towns, such as Turin, preserve the remains of these schemes, which show the very logical way the Romans designed their cities. They would lay out the streets at right angles, in the form of a square grid. All roads were equal in width and length, except for two, which were slightly wider than the others. The decumanus, running east–west, and the cardo, running north–south, intersected in the middle to form the centre of the grid. All roads were made of carefully fitted flag stones and filled in with smaller, hard-packed rocks and pebbles. Bridges were constructed where needed. Each square marked by four roads was called an insula, the Roman equivalent of a modern city block.Each insula was about 80 yards (73 m) square. As the city developed, it could eventually be filled with buildings of various shapes and sizes and criss-crossed with back roads and alleys.The city may have been surrounded by a wall to protect it from invaders and to mark the city limits. Areas outside city limits were left open as farmland. At the end of each main road was a large gateway with watchtowers. A portcullis covered the opening when the city was under siege, and additional watchtowers were constructed along the city walls. An aqueduct was built outside the city walls.The development of Greek and Roman urbanisation is relatively well-known, as there are relatively many written sources, and there has been much attention to the subject since the Romans and Greeks are generally regarded as the main ancestors of modern Western culture. It should not be forgotten, though, that there were also other cultures with more or less urban settlements in Europe, primarily of Celtic origin.[14] Among these, there are also cases that appear to have been newly planned, such as the Lusatian town of Biskupin in Poland.Medieval EuropePlan of Elburg in The Netherlands, based on the cadastral plan of 1830. Elburg was founded in 1392 by Arent toe Boecop, steward of the duke of Gelre. Arent seems to have acted as a private entrepreneur. He had bought a piece of land next to the existing town, and he obtained permission from his lord to extend and rebuild the town, and to resettle the population of the surrounding area, selling the house lots to the settlers. The highly symmetrical layout is centred on a canalised river and an intersecting street. The symmetry is disturbed, however, by the church in the eastern corner and by the pre-existing street (the only curved one in the whole town) on the northwest side. The corner bastions and the wide outer ditch were added in the late 16th century.After the gradual disintegration and fall of the West-Roman empire in the 5th century and the devastation by the invasions of Huns, Germanic peoples, Byzantines, Moors, Magyars, and Normans in the next five centuries, little remained of urban culture in western and central Europe. In the 10th and 11th centuries, though, there appears to have been a general improvement in the political stability and economy. This made it possible for trade and craft to grow and for the monetary economy and urban culture to revive. Initially, urban culture recovered particularly in existing settlements, often in remnants of Roman towns and cities, but later on, ever more towns were created anew. Meanwhile, the population of western Europe increased rapidly and the utilised agricultural area grew with it. The agricultural areas of existing villages were extended and new villages and towns were created in uncultivated areas as cores for new reclamations.[15]Urban development in the early Middle Ages, characteristically focused on a fortress, a fortified abbey, or a (sometimes abandoned) Roman nucleus, occurred "like the annular rings of a tree",[16] whether in an extended village or the centre of a larger city. Since the new centre was often on high, defensible ground, the city plan took on an organic character, following the irregularities of elevation contours like the shapes that result from agricultural terracing.Caernarvon (Wales). Plan by John Speed, 1611. Caernarfon castle and town were re-founded by King Edward I of England in July 1283, during his second Welsh campaign to end the Second War of Independence.In the 9th to 14th centuries, many hundreds of new towns were built in Europe, and many others were enlarged with newly planned extensions. These new towns and town extensions have played a very important role in the shaping of Europe's geographical structures as they in modern times. New towns were founded in different parts of Europe from about the 9th century on, but most of them were realised from the 12th to 14th centuries, with a peak-period at the end of the 13th. All kinds of landlords, from the highest to the lowest rank, tried to found new towns on their estates, in order to gain economical, political or military power. The settlers of the new towns generally were attracted by fiscal, economic, and juridical advantages granted by the founding lord, or were forced to move from elsewhere from his estates. Most of the new towns were to remain rather small (as for instance the bastides of southwestern France), but some of them became important cities, such as Cardiff, Leeds, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Montauban, Bilbao, Malmö, Lübeck, Munich, Berlin, Bern, Klagenfurt, Alessandria, Warsaw and Sarajevo.[17]From the evidence of the preserved towns, it appears that the formal structure of many of these towns was willfully planned. The newly founded towns often show a marked regularity in their plan form, in the sense that the streets are often straight and laid out at right angles to one another, and that the house lots are rectangular, and originally largely of the same size.[18] One very clear and relatively extreme example is Elburg in the Netherlands, dating from the end of the 14th century. (see illustration) Looking at town plans such as the one of Elburg, it clearly appears that it is impossible to maintain that the straight street and the symmetrical, orthogonal town plan were new inventions from ‘the Renaissance,' and, therefore, typical of ‘modern times.'The deep depression around the middle of the 14th century marked the end of the period of great urban expansion. Only in the parts of Europe where the process of urbanisation had started relatively late, as in eastern Europe, was it still to go on for one or two more centuries. It would not be until the Industrial Revolution that the same level of expansion of urban population would be reached again, although the number of newly created settlements would remain much lower than in the 12th and 13th centuries.[citation needed]Renaissance Europe (1300-1600)Florence was an early model of the new urban planning, which took on a star-shaped layout adapted from the new star fort, designed to resist cannon fire. This model was widely imitated, reflecting the enormous cultural power of Florence in this age; "[t]he Renaissance was hypnotised by one city type which for a century and a half – from Filarete to Scamozzi – was impressed upon utopian schemes: this is the star-shaped city".[19] Radial streets extend outward from a defined centre of military, communal or spiritual power.The Ideal City (probably by Fra Carnevale, c. 1480–1484) exemplifies Renaissance ideals of urban planning. The Roman archway and colosseum suggest the value of military victory and mass entertainment.The ideal centrally planned urban space: Sposalizio by Raphael Sanzio, 1504Only in ideal cities did a centrally planned structure stand at the heart, as in Raphael's Sposalizio (Illustration) of 1504. As built, the unique example of a rationally planned quattrocento new city centre, that of Vigevano (1493–95), resembles a closed space instead, surrounded by arcading.Filarete's ideal city, building on Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria, was named "Sforzinda" in compliment to his patron; its twelve-pointed shape, circumscribable by a "perfect" Pythagorean figure, the circle, took no heed of its undulating terrain in Filarete's manuscript.[20] This process occurred in cities, but ordinarily not in the industrial suburbs characteristic of this era (see Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life), which remained disorderly and characterised by crowding and organic growth.Following the 1695 bombardment of Brussels by the French troops of King Louis XIV, in which a large part of the city centre was destroyed, Governor Max Emanuel proposed using the reconstruction to completely change the layout and architectural style of the city. His plan was to transform the medieval city into a city of the new Baroque style, modeled on Turin, with a logical street layout, with straight avenues offering long, uninterrupted views flanked by buildings of a uniform size. This plan was opposed by residents and municipal authorities, who wanted a rapid reconstruction, did not have the resources for grandiose proposals, and resented what they considered the imposition of a new, foreign, architectural style. In the actual reconstruction, the general layout of the city was conserved, but it was not identical to that before the cataclysm. Despite the necessity of rapid reconstruction and the lack of financial means, authorities did take several measures to improve traffic flow, sanitation, and the aesthetics of the city. Many streets were made as wide as possible to improve traffic flow.Enlightenment Europe and AmericaDuring the Second French Empire, Haussmann transformed the medieval city of Paris into a modern capital, with long, straight, wide boulevards. The planning was influenced by many factors, not the least of which was the city's history of street revolutions.Illustration of Savannah, Georgia on the Oglethorpe Plan in 1734.During this period, rulers often embarked on ambitious attempts at redesigning their capital cities as a showpiece for the grandeur of the nation. Disasters were often a major catalyst for planned reconstruction. An exception to this was in London after the Great Fire of 1666 when, despite many radical rebuilding schemes from architects such as John Evelyn and Christopher Wren, no large-scale redesigning was achieved due to the complexities of rival ownership claims. However, improvements were made in hygiene and fire safety with wider streets, stone construction and access to the river.The Great Fire did, however, stimulate thinking about urban design that influenced city planning in North America. The Grand Model for the Province of Carolina, developed in the aftermath of the Great Fire, established a template for colonial planning. The famous Oglethorpe Plan for Savannah (1733) was in part influenced by the Grand Model.Model of the seismically protective wooden structure, the "gaiola pombalina" (pombaline cage), developed for the reconstruction of Pombaline Lower TownIn contrast, after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, King Joseph I of Portugal and his ministers immediately launched efforts to rebuild the city. The architect Manuel da Maia boldly proposed razing entire sections of the city and "laying out new streets without restraint". This last option was chosen by the king and his minister.[21] Keen to have a new and perfectly ordered city, the king commissioned the construction of big squares, rectilinear, large avenues and widened streets – the new mottos of Lisbon. The Pombaline buildings were among the earliest seismically protected constructions in Europe.An even more ambitious reconstruction was carried out in Paris. In 1852, Georges-Eugène Haussmann was commissioned to remodel the Medieval street plan of the city by demolishing swathes of the old quarters and laying out wide boulevards, extending outwards beyond the old city limits. Haussmann's project encompassed all aspects of urban planning, both in the centre of Paris and in the surrounding districts, with regulations imposed on building façades, public parks, sewers and water works, city facilities, and public monuments. Beyond aesthetic and sanitary considerations, the wide thoroughfares facilitated troop movement and policing.[22]A concurrent plan to extend Barcelona was based on a scientific analysis of the city and its modern requirements. It was drawn up by the Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà to fill the space beyond the city walls after they were demolished from 1854. He is credited with inventing the term ‘urbanisation’ and his approach was codified in his General Theory of Urbanisation (1867). Cerdà's Eixample (Catalan for 'extension') consisted of 550 regular blocks with chamfered corners to facilitate the movement of trams, crossed by three wider avenues. His objectives were to improve the health of the inhabitants, towards which the blocks were built around central gardens and orientated NW-SE to maximise the sunlight they received, and assist social integration.[23]Modern urban planning[edit]The L'Enfant Plan for Washington, D.C., as revised by Andrew Ellicott in 1792Planning and architecture went through a paradigm shift at the turn of the 20th century. The industrialised cities of the 19th century had grown at a tremendous rate, with the pace and style of building largely dictated by private business concerns. The evils of urban life for the working poor were becoming increasingly evident as a matter for public concern. The laissez-faire style of government management of the economy, in fashion for most of the Victorian era, was starting to give way to a New Liberalism that championed intervention on the part of the poor and disadvantaged. Around 1900, theorists began developing urban planning models to mitigate the consequences of the industrial age, by providing citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments.Modern zoning, which enabled planners to legally demarcate sections of cities for different functions, originated in Prussia, and spread to Britain, the US, and Scandinavia.[24] Public health was cited as a rationale for keeping cities organized.[25]Garden city movement[edit]The concept of Arturo Soria's of the linear city model and the "linear city movement"Ebenezer Howard's influential 1902 diagram, illustrating urban growth through garden city "off-shoots"The first major urban planning theorist was Sir Ebenezer Howard, who initiated the garden city movement in 1898. This was inspired by earlier planned communities built by industrial philanthropists in the countryside, such as Cadburys' Bournville, Lever's Port Sunlight and George Pullman's eponymous Pullman in Chicago. All these settlements decentralised the working environment from the centre of the cities, and provided a healthy living space for the factory workers. Howard generalised this achievement into a planned movement for the country as a whole. He was also influenced by the work of economist Alfred Marshall who argued in 1884 that industry needed a supply of labour that could in theory be supplied anywhere, and that companies have an incentive to improve workers living standards as the company bears much of the cost inflicted by the unhealthy urban conditions in the big cities.[26]Howard's ideas, although utopian, were also highly practical and were adopted around the world in the ensuing decades. His garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by parks, containing proportionate and separate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. Inspired by the Utopian novel Looking Backward and Henry George's work Progress and Poverty, Howard published his book Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1898, commonly regarded as the most important book in the history of urban planning.[27] His idealised garden city would house 32,000 people on a site of 6,000 acres (2,428 ha), planned on a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks and six radial boulevards, 120 ft (37 m) wide, extending from the centre. The garden city would be self-sufficient and when it reached full population, another garden city would be developed nearby. Howard envisaged a cluster of several garden cities as satellites of a central city of 50,000 people, linked by road and rail.[28]He founded First Garden City, Ltd. in 1899 to create the first garden city at Letchworth, Hertfordshire.[29] Donors to the project collected interest on their investment if the garden city generated profits through rents or, as Fishman calls the process, ‘philanthropic land speculation’.[30] Howard tried to include working class cooperative organisations, which included over two million members, but could not win their financial support.[31] In 1904, Raymond Unwin, a noted architect and town planner, along with his partner Richard Barry Parker, won the competition run by the First Garden City, Limited to plan Letchworth, an area 34 miles outside London.[32] Unwin and Parker planned the town in the centre of the Letchworth estate with Howard's large agricultural greenbelt surrounding the town, and they shared Howard's notion that the working class deserved better and more affordable housing. However, the architects ignored Howard's symmetric design, instead replacing it with a more ‘organic’ design.[33]Welwyn Garden City, also in Hertfordshire was also built on Howard's principles. His successor as chairman of the Garden City Association was Sir Frederic Osborn, who extended the movement to regional planning.[34]The principles of the garden city were soon applied to the planning of city suburbs. The first such project was the Hampstead Garden Suburb founded by Henrietta Barnett[35] and planned by Parker and Unwin. The scheme's utopian ideals were that it should be open to all classes of people with free access to woods and gardens and that the housing should be of low density with wide, tree-lined roads.In North America, the Garden City movement was also popular, and evolved into the "Neighbourhood Unit" form of development. In the early 1900s, as cars were introduced to city streets for the first time, residents became increasingly concerned with the number of pedestrians being injured by car traffic. The response, seen first in Radburn, New Jersey, was the Neighbourhood Unit-style development, which oriented houses toward a common public path instead of the street. The neighbourhood is distinctively organised around a school, with the intention of providing children a safe way to walk to school.[36][37]Urban planning profession[edit]Urban planning became professionalised at this period, with input from utopian visionaries as well as from the practical minded infrastructure engineers and local councillors combining to produce new design templates for political consideration. The Town and Country Planning Association was founded in 1899 and the first academic course on urban planning was offered by the University of Liverpool in 1909.[38]The first official consideration of these new trends was embodied in the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 that compelled local authorities to introduce coherent systems of town planning across the country using the new principles of the 'garden city', and to ensure that all housing construction conformed to specific building standards.[39]Following this Act, surveyors, civil engineers, architects, lawyers and others began working together within local government in the UK to draw up schemes for the development of land and the idea of town planning as a new and distinctive area of expertise began to be formed. In 1910, Thomas Adams was appointed as the first Town Planning Inspector at the Local Government Board, and began meeting with practitioners. The Town Planning Institute was established in 1914 with a mandate to advance the study of town-planning and civic design.[40] The first university course in America was established at Harvard University in 1924.The Tudor Walters Committee that recommended the building of housing estates after World War One incorporated the ideas of Howard's disciple Raymond Unwin, who demonstrated that homes could be built rapidly and economically whilst maintaining satisfactory standards for gardens, family privacy and internal spaces. Unwin diverged from Howard by proposing that the new developments should be peripheral 'satellites' rather than fully-fledged garden cities.[41]Modernism[edit]Partizánske in Slovakia – an example of a typical planned industrial city founded in 1938 together with a shoemaking factory in which practically all adult inhabitants of the city were employed.A 1939 model envisions Berlin transformed into the Welthauptstadt Germania (World Capital Germania).the Seven Sisters in Moscow in the "Wedding Cake Style Buildings" with the "ring roads" in the cityIn the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning. The influential modernist architect Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular, park-like green spaces. At the centre was a huge transportation hub that on different levels included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and at the top, an airport. Le Corbusier had the fanciful notion that commercial airliners would land between the huge skyscrapers. He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. As one moved out from the central skyscrapers, smaller low-story, zig-zag apartment blocks (set far back from the street amid green space) housed the inhabitants. Le Corbusier hoped that politically minded industrialists in France would lead the way with their efficient Taylorist and Fordist strategies adopted from American industrial models to re-organise society.[42]In 1925, he exhibited his Plan Voisin, in which he proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine and replace it with his sixty-story cruciform towers from the Contemporary City, placed within an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism, eventually publishing them in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) in 1935. Perhaps the most significant difference between the Contemporary City and the Radiant City is that the latter abandoned the class-based stratification of the former; housing was now assigned according to family size, not economic position.[43] Le Corbusier's theories were sporadically adopted by the builders of public housing in Europe and the United States.Many of his disciples became notable in their own right, including painter-architect Nadir Afonso, who absorbed Le Corbusier's ideas into his own aesthetics theory. Lúcio Costa's city plan of Brasília and the industrial city of Zlín planned by František Lydie Gahura in the Czech Republic are notable plans based on his ideas, while the architect himself produced the plan for Chandigarh in India. Le Corbusier's thinking also had been profoundly effected by the philosophy of Futurism and Constructivism in Russia at the turn of the 20th century.Another important theorist was Sir Patrick Geddes who understood the importance of taking the regional environment into account and the relationship between social issues and town planning, and foresaw the emergence of huge urban conurbations. In 1927, he was commissioned to plan the city of Tel Aviv, then in Mandatory Palestine. It consisted of about 40 blocks, sized around 150 metres squared. The block contained an inner small public garden, disposed into a windmill configuration of inner access roads, making it awkward for car traffic. The big blocks form a gently undulating street pattern, north–south commercial, east–west arranged to catch the sea breeze. This was a simple and efficient manner to modernise the historical fixed grid patterns. A series of shaded boulevards short cuts the system, with some public squares, accessing the sea front. The plan of the new town became a success.Urban planning in communist countries has often modeled itself on Western modernism, using the authority of the state to implement efficient urban designs produced in administrative centers. (In Russia this process was nominally decentralized after the end of the USSR, but Moscow remains the source of much of the country's urban planning expertise.)[44] Germany under national socialism also undertook grandiose schemes for urban redesign.[45]New Towns[edit]Ebenezer Howard's urban planning concepts were only adopted on a large scale after World War II. The damage brought on by the war provoked significant public interest in what post-war Britain would be like, which was encouraged by the government, who facilitated talk about a ‘Better Britain’ to boost morale. Post-war rebuilding initiatives saw new plans drafted for London, which, for the first time, addressed the issue of de-centralisation. Firstly, the County of London Plan 1943 recognised that displacement of population and employment was necessary if the city was to be rebuilt at a desirable density. Moreover, the Greater London Plan of 1944 went further by suggesting that over one million people would need to be displaced into a mixture of satellite suburbs, existing rural towns, and new towns.[46]The New Towns Act 1946 resulted in many New Towns being constructed in Britain over the following decades.[47][48]New towns were built in the United States from the 1960s – examples include Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Jonathan, Minnesota and Riverside Plaza. This construction effort was combined with extensive federal government grants for slum clearance, improved and increased housing and road construction and comprehensive urban renewal projects. Other European countries such as France, Germany, Italy and Sweden also had some successes with new towns, especially as part of post-war reconstruction efforts.ContemporaryUrban planning has grown in prominence with rising urbanization.[49]Reaction against modernismBy the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[50]Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy; this is the post-modernist era.[50]Minimally planned cities still exist. Houston is a large city (with a metropolitan population of 5.5 million) in a developed country without a comprehensive zoning ordinance. Houston does, however, restrict development densities and mandate parking, even though specific land uses are not regulated. Also, private-sector developers in Houston use subdivision covenants and deed restrictions to effect land-use restrictions resembling zoning laws. Houston voters have rejected comprehensive zoning ordinances three times since 1948.BehaviorismBehaviorist psychology influenced urban planning especially in the 1960s and after, manifesting in such theories as defensible space and crime prevention through environmental design.[51]New UrbanismMain article: New UrbanismJakriborg in Sweden, started in the late 1990s as a new urbanist eco-friendly new town near MalmöVarious current movements in urban design seek to create sustainable urban environments with long-lasting structures, buildings and a great liveability for its inhabitants. The most clearly defined form of walkable urbanism is known as the Charter of New Urbanism. It is an approach for successfully reducing environmental impacts by altering the built environment to create and preserve smart cities that support sustainable transport. Residents in compact urban neighbourhoods drive fewer miles and have significantly lower environmental impacts across a range of measures compared with those living in sprawling suburbs.[52] The concept of Circular flow land use management has also been introduced in Europe to promote sustainable land use patterns that strive for compact cities and a reduction of greenfield land taken by urban sprawl.A road crossing at UNCTAD XIII in Doha, Qatar. Traffic in Qatar is separated into two roads, one serving each direction.In sustainable construction, the recent movement of New Classical Architecture promotes a sustainable approach towards urban construction that appreciates and develops smart growth, walkability, architectural tradition, and classical design.[53][54] This is in contrast to modernist and short-lived globally uniform architecture, as well as opposing solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl.[55] Both trends started in the 1980s.[56]Critics of New Urbanism have argued that its environmental aspect is too focused on transport and excessive individual mobility. The real problem with the unsustainable nature of modern cities is not just about cars and too much driving - it is about the entire urban metabolism of the city (of which auto-mobility is less than half of the overall ecological footprint and accounts for about half of the GHG emissions/carbon footprint). They have also argued that land-use planning can do little to achieve sustainability without regulating the design and associated technology of the actual development within a zoned area. Distances and density are relatively unimportant; it is the total metabolism of the development that determines the environmental impact. Also, the emphasis needs to shift from sustainability to resilience, and the spatial scope from the city to the whole urban region.[57] A further criticism is that the New Urbanist project of compacting urban form is a difficult and slow process. In the new global situation, with the horizontal, low-density growth irreversibly dominant, and climate change already happening, it would be wiser to focus efforts on the resilience of whole city-regions, retrofitting the existing sprawl for sustainability and self-sufficiency, and investing heavily in 'green infrastructure'.[58]Sustainable development and sustainability[edit]Sustainable development has emerged in recent decades as guiding themes for urban planning. This term was defined and advocated in 1987 report Our Common Future, published by the World Commission on Environment and Development.[59]Robert Hoddle's survey of Melbourne in 1837. The layout of the city is referred to as the "Hoddle Grid".Some planners argue that modern lifestyles use too many natural resources, polluting or destroying ecosystems, increasing social inequality, creating urban heat islands, and causing climate change. Many urban planners, therefore, advocate sustainable cities.[56][60]However, sustainable development is a recent, controversial concept.[60] Wheeler, in his 2004 book, defines sustainable urban development as "development that improves the long-term social and ecological health of cities and towns." He sketches a 'sustainable' city's features: compact, efficient land use; less automobile use, yet better access; efficient resource use; less pollution and waste; the restoration of natural systems; good housing and living environments; a healthy social ecology; a sustainable economy; community participation and involvement; and preservation of local culture and wisdom.[60] Urban planners are now promoting a sustainable city model, which consists of cities that are designed with consideration of environmental impacts, such as minimising the uses of energy, water, and the outputs of waste and pollution.[56]Because of political and governance structures in most jurisdictions, sustainable planning measures must be widely supported before they can affect institutions and regions. Actual implementation is often a complex compromise.[61]Nature in cities Often an integral party of sustainable cities is the Incorporation of nature within a city.Car free sustainability in city planning can include large pedestrian zones or be a totally Car free.Collaborative planning in the United States[edit]Collaborative planning arose in the US in response to the inadequacy of traditional public participation techniques to provide real opportunities for the public to make decisions affecting their communities. Collaborative planning is a method designed to empower stakeholders by elevating them to the level of decision-makers through direct engagement and dialogue between stakeholders and public agencies, to solicit ideas, active involvement, and participation in the community planning process. Active public involvement can help planners achieve better outcomes by making them aware of the public's needs and preferences and by using local knowledge to inform projects. When properly administered, collaboration can result in more meaningful participation and better, more creative outcomes to persistent problems than traditional participation methods. It enables planners to make decisions that reflect community needs and values, it fosters faith in the wisdom and utility of the resulting project, and the community is given a personal stake in its success.[62]Experiences in Portland and Seattle have demonstrated that successful collaborative planning depends on a number of interrelated factors: the process must be truly inclusive, with all stakeholders and affected groups invited to the table; the community must have final decision-making authority; full government commitment (of both financial and intellectual resources) must be manifest; participants should be given clear objectives by planning staff, who facilitate the process by providing guidance, consultancy, expert opinions, and research; and facilitators should be trained in conflict resolution and community organisation

Below I am posting notes of 13th September 2020 from The Hindu, PIB, Indian Express etc…hope they might give you some insights regarding notes making.Source: Telegram Channel: Prelims Specific Notes for IAS (these are key words to be used in the search bar of the Telegram App).Prelims Specific Analysis: 13th September 2020The Hindu, PIB, IE and OthersIndexIndices/Committees/Reports/Organisations1. Global Economic Freedom Index 2020 (livemint)2. Shanghai Cooperation Organisation | A counter-coalition of Eurasian powers (TH, pg 12)Geography, Environment and Biodiversity3. Ecological Threat Register (DTE)Schemes/Policies/Initiatives/Social Issues4. Bharat Craft Portal (livemint)5. Integrated Road Accident Database Project (iRAD) (PIB)International Relations6. India’s Logistics Agreements (TH, pg 7)7. Open trading border posts between India and China (TH, pg 1)Science and Technology; Defence8. Indian Brain Template (PIB)9. Methane Hydrate Deposits (PIB)10. Hypersonic Technology Demonstrator Vehicle (HSTDV) (TH, pg 11)11. Some of the ground-breaking inventions and innovators who have made the hand-held fast, versatile computers possible (TH, pg 11)Economy12. Singapore Convention on Mediation comes into force (TH, pg 9)Art, Culture and History13. National School of Drama (PIB)Indices/Committees/Reports/OrganisationsGlobal Economic Freedom Index 2020 (livemint)Context: India’s rank in the Global Economic Freedom Index 2020 dropped 26 spots from 79 to 105 among 162 countries and territories, according to the Economic Freedom of the World: 2020 Annual Report released recently.AnalysisThe report, prepared by Canada’s Fraser Institute, was released in India in collaboration with New Delhi-based think tank Centre For Civil Society.The report measures the ‘economic freedom’, or the ability of individuals to make their own economic decisions in a country, by analysing policies and institutions of these countries.It does so by looking at indicators like regulations, the freedom to trade internationally, size of government, property rights, government spending and taxation.In India, the report was co-published by Delhi-based Centre for Civil Society.According to the 2020 report, India performed worse in terms of size of government, regulations and the freedom to trade internationally.China ranked worse than India overall and was positioned at 124 on the index.The ranking is based on 2018 data, newer restrictions on international trade, tightening of the credit market due to NPAs and the impact of Covid-19 on debt and deficits were not reflected in India’s score.Hong Kong and Singapore retain the top two positions.Shanghai Cooperation Organisation | A counter-coalition of Eurasian powers (TH, pg 12)The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a permanent intergovernmental organisation.The SCO grew out of the Shanghai Five grouping — of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — which was set up in 1996 to resolve boundary disputes between China and each of the four other members.It admitted Uzbekistan in 2001, re-christened itself the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and broadened its agenda to include political, economic and security cooperation.In June 2017 in Astana (the capital city of Kazakhstan), India and Pakistan became full members of the Organization.The admission of India and Pakistan has expanded the geographical, demographic and economic profile of the SCO, which now has about half the world’s population and a quarter of its GDP.The SCO has four observer States: Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia.The SCO has six dialogue partners: Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey, and Sri Lanka.The Heads of State Council (HSC) is the supreme decision-making body in the SCO which meets once a year.The organisation has two permanent bodies — the SCO Secretariat based in Beijing and the Executive Committee of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) based in Tashkent.The SCO Secretary-General and the Director of the Executive Committee of the SCO RATS are appointed by the Council of Heads of State for a term of three years.The SCO's official languages are Russian and Chinese.Shanghai Cooperation Organization sometimes also referred as ‘Eastern NATO’.The SCO's main goals are as follows:strengthening mutual trust and neighbourliness among the member states;promoting their effective cooperation in politics, trade, the economy, research, technology and culture, as well as in education, energy, transport, tourism, environmental protection, and other areas;making joint efforts to maintain and ensure peace, security and stability in the region; andmoving towards the establishment of a democratic, fair and rational new international political and economic order.Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) of the SCO – It coordinates cooperation for security and stability, through intelligence-sharing on criminal and terrorist activities.India will host the meeting of Council of Heads of Government in 2020.U.S. and Europe called it the “Anti-NATO” for proposing military cooperation.In 2005, the Astana declaration called for SCO countries to work on a “joint SCO response to situations that threaten peace, security and stability in the region”.Geography, Environment and BiodiversityEcological Threat Register (DTE)The Ecological Threat Register (ETR) covers around 157 independent states and territories.Produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the ETR measures ecological threats that countries are currently facing and provides projections to 2050.The ETR is unique in that it combines measures of resilience with the most comprehensive ecological data available to shed light on the countries least likely to cope with extreme ecological shocks, now and into the future.The IEP's Positive Peace framework is used to identify areas where resilience is unlikely to be strong enough to adapt or cope with these future shocks.The ETR clusters threats into two major domains: resource scarcity and natural disasters.The resource scarcity domain includes food insecurity, water scarcity and high population growth.The natural disaster domain measures the threat of floods, droughts, cyclones, sea level rise and rising temperatures.The ETR identifies three clusters of ecological hotspots, which are particularly susceptible to collapse:The Sahel-Horn belt of Africa, from Mauritania to Somalia;The Southern African belt, from Angola to Madagascar;The Middle East and Central Asian belt, from Syria to Pakistan.Within these hotspots the most fragile countries will include Iran, Mozambique, Madagascar, Pakistan and Kenya.Schemes/Policies/Initiatives/Social IssuesBharat Craft Portal (livemint)More than a year after being announced, the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME)’s proposal to create an online e-marketplace similar to Amazon, which would be open to all consumers, is yet to take off due to lack of a business plan, the unavailability of a technology partner, and shortage of funds.Officially set to be the government’s first foray into the private sector, initial estimates had eyed ~10 trillion worth of revenue from the project over a period of 2-3 years. But subsequent studies have shown the real figures may be substantially lower.While the primary mandate remains an e-marketplace for showcasing products by tribal, rural, and small businesses, market surveys showed buyer interest may remain muted for such products.Instead, online primary consumer activity remains focused on brands and bargain hunting, key attributes that products on the platform may not have.Integrated Road Accident Database Project (iRAD) (PIB)The Ministry of Road Transport & Highways is in the process of implementing ‘Integrated Road Accident Database Project (iRAD)’ which will be applicable across the country.In the first instance, it has been decided to implement the proposal in six States, viz. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.The development and implementation of iRAD has been entrusted to lIT Madras and National Informatics Centre Services Inc.This project is proposed on IT based system for capturing the spot accident data using mobile app configured for this purpose.This data can then be utilized for various purposes like finding the causes of the accidents and remedial measures to improve the road infrastructure, to record the accidents data for the use of police, health services and other concerned departments.International RelationsIndia’s Logistics Agreements (TH, pg 7)Context: After concluding a logistics support agreement with Japan in September 2020, India is now working on three such agreements with Russia, the U.K. and Vietnam.AnalysisIndia now has military logistics agreements with all Quad countries, Australia, Japan and the U.S., significantly improving interoperability as they also operate several common military platforms.India has been signing MLSAs with countries primarily eyeing deeper maritime cooperation which is important considering China's rapid military expansionism in the Indo-Pacific, Indian Ocean and South China Sea.India has already signed such agreements with a few countries beginning with the U.S.India signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Understanding (LEMOA) with the U.S. in August 2016 after decade-long negotiations.After India signed the foundational agreement Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) with the U.S., it got access to encrypted communication systems for seamless communication.As part of this, in March 2019 the Navy and U.S. Navy signed a loan agreement and installed two Pacific fleet provided CENTRIXS (Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System) kits at the Indian Navy headquarters.Since then, it has concluded several such agreements with Australia, France, Oman, the Philippines and Singapore and gained access to the Sabang port in Indonesia.In June 2020, India and Australia signed the long pending Mutual Logistics Support (MLSA), elevated their partnership to Comprehensive Strategic partnership, and also announced a joint declaration on a shared vision for maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.The logistics pact with Japan, Reciprocal Provision of Supplies and Services between armed forces, was signed in September. India and Japan have already signed an implementing arrangement for deeper cooperation between the Navy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force (JMSDF).Logistics AgreementsLogistics agreements are administrative arrangements facilitating access to military facilities for exchange of fuel and provisions on mutual agreement, simplifying logistical support and increasing operational turnaround of the military away from India.The biggest beneficiary of the logistics pacts has been the Navy which interacts and exercises the most with foreign navies.When operating on the high seas, exercises or during humanitarian assistance missions fuel, food and other needs can be exchanged and settled through the established modalities later.Open trading border posts between India and China (TH, pg 1)India-China standoff casts a shadow on Nathu La border trade.While the pandemic stalled business this year, the 200 traders from Sikkim fear LAC tensions may affect their work next year too.Nathu La is one of the three open trading border posts between India and China; the other two being Shipkila in Himachal Pradesh and Lipulekh (or Lipulech) in Uttarakhand.Science and Technology; DefenceIndian Brain Template (PIB)Context: An Indian brain template for five distinct age groups as well as a brain atlas to help accurate assessment of psychiatric illnesses and conduct neuro-surgical operations have been developed by neuroscientists at the Bengaluru-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS).AnalysisThe neuroscientists studied over 500 brain scans of Indian patients to develop five sets of templates and a brain atlas for five age groups covering late childhood to late adulthood (six to 60 years).The significance of this study is that neuroscientists need not be dependent upon the current universal standard of using the Montreal Neurological Index (MNI) template.The MNI was developed by averaging Caucasian brains. Over a period of time, neuroscientists discovered that Caucasian brains are different from Asian brains.Scientists from across the world have been pointing out that there are significant variations in the location of key brain regions and the density of neurons in various brain areas between racial types.Drawing from this, several countries, including China, South Korea and Canada, have brain templates of their population.The project is funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Newton Grant from the Medical Research Council (MRC), UK.What is a Brain Template?Database of brain images from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), when compiled together, results in the so-called Brain Template (BT).Methane Hydrate Deposits (PIB)Context: Scientists have said that the massive methane hydrate deposits of biogenic origin in the Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin and near the coast of Andaman and Mahanadi make it necessary to study the associated methanogenic community.Even the lowest estimate of methane present in the methane hydrates in KG Basin is twice that of all fossil fuel reserves available worldwide.AnalysisMethane hydrate deposits are believed to be a larger hydrocarbon resource than all of the world's oil, natural gas and coal resources combined.The current challenge is to inventory this resource and find safe, economical ways to develop it.What is Methane Hydrate?Methane hydrate is a crystalline solid that consists of a methane molecule surrounded by a cage of interlocking water molecules.Methane hydrate is an "ice" that only occurs naturally in subsurface deposits where temperature and pressure conditions are favorable for its formation.Most methane hydrate deposits also contain small amounts of other hydrocarbon hydrates.These include propane hydrate and ethane hydrate.Where are the Methane Hydrate Deposits?Four Earth environments have the temperature and pressure conditions suitable for the formation and stability of methane hydrate. These are:sediment and sedimentary rock units below Arctic permafrost;sedimentary deposits along continental margins;deep-water sediments of inland lakes and seas; and,under Antarctic ice.With the exception of the Antarctic deposits, methane hydrate accumulations are not very deep below Earth's surface.In most situations the methane hydrate is within a few hundred meters of the sediment surface.How are Methane Hydrates produced?Methane gas is primarily formed by microorganisms (methanogens) that live in the deep sediment layers and slowly convert organic substances to methane.These organic materials are the remains of plankton that lived in the ocean long ago, sank to the ocean floor, and were finally incorporated into the sediments.Methane hydrate is formed when hydrogen-bonded water and methane gas come into contact at high pressures and low temperatures in oceans.But with increasing depth into the thick sediment layers on the sea floor, the temperatures begin to rise again because of the proximity to the Earth’s interior. In sediment depths greater than about 1 kilometre the temperatures rise to over 30 degrees Celsius, so that no methane hydrates can be deposited.This, however, is where the methane formation is especially vigorous.First, small methane gas bubbles are produced deep within the sediment.These then rise and are transformed to methane hydrates in the cooler pore waters near the sea floor.So, the methane is formed in the deep warm sediment horizons and is converted and consolidated as methane hydrate in the cold upper sediment layers.No methane hydrates are found in marginal seas and shelf areas because the pressure at the sea floor is not sufficient to stabilize the hydrates.At the bottom of the expansive ocean basins, on the other hand, where the pressure is great enough, scarcely any hydrates are found because there is insufficient organic matter embedded in the deep-sea sediments.The reason for this is that in the open sea the water is comparatively nutrient poor, so that little biomass is produced to sink to the sea floor.Methane hydrates therefore occur mainly near the continental margins at water depths between 350 and 5000 metres.For one reason, enough organic material is deposited in the sediments there, and for another, the temperature and pressure conditions are favourable for methane to be converted to methane hydrates.Greenhouse gas formationAt low temperatures the methane hydrates on the sea floor are stable, but if the water and the sea floor become warmer, then the hydrates can break down.Because microorganisms then oxidize the resulting methane gas to form the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), methane hydrates have recently become a topic of intense discussion within the context of climate change.Methane, which itself acts as a strong greenhouse gas, does not escape directly out of the sea as methane because it is transformed into CO2.But the formation and release of carbon dioxide are considerable.An additional problem is that the oxygen in seawater is consumed through the formation of carbon dioxide.Many bacteria use methane to provide energy for their meta­bolism. Some bacteria break the methane down with the help of oxygen. This is called aerobic oxidation. Other bacteria do not need oxygen. This kind of oxidation is called anaerobic.Scientists therefore fear that large quantities of methane hydrate will melt there in the future, releasing increased amounts of CO2 into the ocean and the atmosphere. The oxygen content of the seawater will decrease accordingly.Furthermore, the CO2 released not only contributes to further global warming, it also leads to acidification of the oceans.Ocean acidification is the name given to the ongoing decrease in the pH and increase in acidity of the Earth's oceans, caused by the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.Hypersonic Technology Demonstrator Vehicle (HSTDV) (TH, pg 11)Context: The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) recently successfully flight tested the Hypersonic Technology Demonstrator Vehicle (HSTDV) – an unmanned scramjet vehicle with a capability to travel at six times the speed of sound, making India the fourth country in the world after the US, China and Russia to develop such technology.AnalysisThe test was conducted using the Agni missile. A solid rocket motor of Agni missile was used to take to an altitude of 30 kilometers where the cruise vehicle separated from the launch vehicle and the air intake opened as planned.(Just for understanding!) On the D-day, a launch vehicle, which was derived from Agni 1 missile, rose from its launch pad in Odisha, carrying the HSTDV.The Agni 1 booster climbed to a height of 30 km in 12 seconds at a speed of Mach 5.6.When the launch vehicle reached an altitude of 30 km, the air intake ducts in the scramjet engine opened just before the launch vehicle separated smoothly.At 30 km altitude, the cruise vehicle’s nose cone split in two and fell off. Besides, the heat shield covering the cruiser was jettisoned. All these events took place in micro seconds.Air from the atmosphere was then rammed into the scramjet engine’s combustion chamber at a supersonic speed.The air mixed with the atomised fuel, the fuel was ignited and the scramjet engine revved into action.The HSTDV flew for the next 20 seconds at a hypersonic speed of Mach six and fell 40 km away in the Bay of Bengal. The mission was a success.Indigenous technologyThe centrepiece of the HSTDV was the indigenously developed air-breathing scramjet engine, which formed the HSTDV’s propulsion system. If the mission’s aim was to prove this scramjet engine in flight, it was achieved.In a scramjet engine, air from the atmosphere is rammed into the engine’s combustion chamber at a supersonic speed of more than Mach two.In the chamber, the air mixes with the fuel to ignite a supersonic combustion but the cruiser’s flight will be at a hypersonic speed of Mach six to seven. So, it is called supersonic combustion ramjet or Scramjet.ApplicationsThis successful test will pave the way for missiles that can travel at six times the speed of sound.Apart from being used as a vehicle for hypersonic and long-range cruise missiles, the HSTDV is a dual-use technology that will have multiple civilian applications, including the launch of small satellites at low cost.Mastering the air-breathing scramjet technology will lead to the development of hypersonic missiles, faster civilian air transportation and facilities for putting satellites into orbit at a low cost.The hypersonic vehicle and its scramjet engineThe scramjets are a variant of a category of jet engines called the air breathing engines.The ability of engines to handle airflows of speeds in multiples of speed of sound, gives it a capability of operating at those speeds.Hypersonic speeds are those which are five times or more than the speed of sound (Mach 5 or more).Hypersonic nuclear missilesHypersonic missiles travel at speeds faster than 3,800 miles per hour or 6,115 km per hour, much faster than other ballistic and cruise missiles.They can deliver conventional or nuclear payloads within minutes.They are highly manoeuvrable and do not follow a predictable arc as they travel.They are said to combine the speed of ballistic missiles with the manoeuvring capabilities of cruise missiles.The speed makes them hard to track compared to traditional missile tech.In March this year, the United States announced it had successfully tested an unarmed prototype of a hypersonic missile.Some of the ground-breaking inventions and innovators who have made the hand-held fast, versatile computers possible (TH, pg 11)FORTRAN or Formula Translation: This translated the binary language (0 and 1) of digital computers into everyday language that can be understood and used by all.Integrated Circuits or ICs: Until they were invented, signals were amplified using vacuum tubes. Invention of transistors reduced the size, and power consumption of amplifiers. This caused a revolution in information technology, because using these could actually make a fully integrated complex electronic circuit on a single silicon chip.Relational Database Management System, or RDBMS: Earlier, these files were stored in magnetic tapes, then in floppy discs and now in CDs and pen drives.Local Area Networks (or LANs): A wireless broadcast system to interconnect computers.Ethernet: It allows multiple computers to share and exchange messages and files through cable connections.Public Key Cryptography: To open your phone or a computer, you need a passcode, which is secure and known only to you. And when a bank or a sender sends you a ‘confidential’ message, they too send a secure passcode (e.g., OTP). This aspect is what is known as an encryption system. This public key cryptography is one of the Innovations.Computer Graphics: These are built-in programs that not only allow you to take photographs, movies and send them using applications like WhatsApp, Facetime and such.EconomySingapore Convention on Mediation comes into force (TH, pg 9)Context: The Singapore Convention on Mediation came into force recently (September 2020) and will provide a more effective way for enforcing mediated settlements of corporate disputes involving businesses in India and other countries that are signatories to the Convention.AnalysisAlso known as the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation, this is also the first UN treaty to be named after Singapore.With the Convention in force, businesses seeking enforcement of a mediated settlement agreement across borders can do so by applying directly to the courts of countries that have signed and ratified the treaty, instead of having to enforce the settlement agreement as a contract in accordance with each country’s domestic process.The harmonised and simplified enforcement framework under the Convention translates to savings in time and legal costs, which is important for businesses in times of uncertainty, such as during the current COVID-19 pandemic.As on September 1, the Convention has 53 signatories, including India, China and the U.S.The Convention would boost India’s ‘ease of doing business’ credentials by enabling swift mediated settlements of corporate disputes.Art, Culture and HistoryNational School of Drama (PIB)The National School of Drama (NSD) is foremost theatre training institutions in the world.Established in 1959, the National School of Drama is the only one of its kind in India and is an autonomous organization, fully financed by the Ministry of Culture.One of the foremost theatre training institution in the world, NSD was incepted under the aegis of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and became an independent entity in 1975.National School of Drama had been declared as deemed university by University Grant Commission in 2005.However, National School of Drama has requested the government to declare it as institute of national importance and therefore status of deemed university was not accepted.It is one of the major organisations involved in preservation and propagation of the 13 Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) elements from India that have been inscribed till date on the UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.In 2019, NSD was ranked 14th among the best film schools in the world by CEOWORLD Magazine of the USA.

NOTE: This is an average day. You can imagine the life of the first emperor of Rome was something of a chaotic job. There could be emergencies or deviations every day. Below is just an outline- a basic average day in the life. Dawn (5:00–5:30): Wake up and grab a quick bite of bread and water, throw on your toga, and hit the road. Romans did not do breakfast and slept in their underclothes. Typically after a Roman woke up they hit the road as soon as they were physically able. Early Morning (5:30–7:00): Romans were big on family and the family was the smalled political unit of Rome. Each noble family would be made up of slaves, female family members, young male family members, servants, employees, and more. These people were all apart of the family and the largest of these families could be(more)