For your Final Critical Analysis Paper, you will have the opportunity to choose a place/region that is unfamiliar to you and will assess it through the themes and concepts discussed in class. Student will create a paper applying the themes of three themes and/or concepts from the material covered in class to their chosen place (remember you can go back to your proposal and the feedback you received). Please use subheaders to indicate when you discuss each concept.

The paper must have both an introduction that states the intent of the paper and chosen place AND a conclusion that briefly sums up their thoughts on the project and what they learned or gained through studying their place — in addition to your body paragraphs analyzing the concepts/themes you’ve chosen.

The paper should also contain a bibliography containing at least five sources (you can have more than five sources). Please include both in text citations (when you’re directly referencing a source in your essay) and a reference list for sources. You can use either APA or MLA citations — just make sure you’re being consistent in the paper. Note: the reference list does not count towards the minimum page requirement. Sources can be academic journal articles or books, news reports, government websites/reports. Please do not use Wikipedia, blogs, nongovernmental websites, or online discussions/forums/blogs.

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Here are some questions that can get you thinking about how you might want to go about analyzing the place you’ve chosen. You do not have to answer all these questions, they are just provided as a guide to help you structure your paper and they are related to some of the concepts/themes we discussed in class.

What are the effects of conceptualizing development as economic growth or increasing monetary wealth? Do all peoples and cultures value wealth over all other measurements of development?

When a newspaper talks about a new “development”, what is it usually describing? Does the idea of development privilege one kind of cultural landscape over another? How does this privileging of certain landscapes impact sustainable development and community identity/legacy (for example gentrification)?

How people in a region share a perception of their history, present, and future is reflected in cultural landscapes-both by what is visible and by what is missing — such as in tourist destinations. How is the colonial history of that city or region visible or missing from the cultural landscape? What might the effects of these presences or absences be?

Discuss why/how vulnerability to a natural disaster differs from exposure to a natural disaster. What are some of the potential effects of future climate change upon community legacy/identity?

How is the economy and development of a place structuring urban space? What environmental impacts may be related to a place’s economy, and what are the spatial implications of these impacts?

How can a community’s/region’s identity, legacy, or heritage be defined, known, or studied? How have identities of the region you selected been contested? How have they changed? What work has been done to preserve or protect specific identities or cultures?

How has the culture/identity of the region you have selected has been influenced or shaped by the diffusion of ideas, languages, religions, food, etc. from other regions. How have they diffused and what are the effects? How might this relate to sense of place?