Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Greenfield development
: Urbanization of agricultural land or natural habitat. A
by-product of urban sprawl.
H
Heartland
: The British geographer H. Mackinder is considered one of the
founders of geopolitics. The concept of the Heartland as conceived by Mackinder
[MKI 04] is the strategic heart of the Eurasian continent. By extension, we employ
this term in the sense adopted by D.W. Meinig [MEI 04] to describe the heart of the
North American continent, as opposed to the arc of maritime interfaces (Seaboard)
located to the east, the south, and the west. Our Heartland is the union of two of the
regions proposed by Joel Garreau [GAR 82]: the “The Forge”, east of Chicago and
including the southern Great Lakes, and the “Breadbasket”, the states west of
Chicago. Chicago is itself a transactional city located at the center and uniting both
facades of the Heartland.
Homestead Act
: Enacted in 1862 (replaced by the Federal Land Policy and
Management Act of 1976), the Homestead Act provided for the almost free (for $30)
distribution of federal land (65 acres) to farmers wishing to cultivate land west of the
“frontier”.
Housing project
: The term used to describe federally subsidized housing
developments. Introduced by the Wagner Bill of 1937, federal housing policy never
amounted to a significant proportion of the housing stock. The largest housing
projects have generally been demolished to make way for mixed areas involving
landlords and tenants to avoid the concentration of criminality and minorities of the
poorest housing projects.
HPS (Hurricane Protection System)
: By vote of Congress only a few months
before the flooding and devastation of Hurricane Betsy (September 1965), the Flood
Control Act of May 1965 ordered the United States Army Corps of Engineers
(USACE) to build a system of dikes to protect the New Orleans metropolitan area
against flood risks associated with hurricane storm surge. The first program, entitled
“Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity”, began in 1966 to protect east bank New Orleans,
St Bernard Paris and east bank Jefferson Parish on the side of lakes Pontchartrain
and Borgne. Another project, “New Orleans to Venice”, began simultaneously with
protection for locations downriver in Plaquemines Parish. Finally, suburban
development on the right bank of the Mississippi led to construction, beginning in
1991, of a third project, called “West Bank and Vicinity”. Seventy percent funded
by federal funds, the HPS represented over 200 km of levees and flood walls on the
