Chinatown: Lesson 1
Location, Location, Location: The Organic and Strategic Development of Chinatown
Urban Development and the Prime Location of San Francisco's Chinatown
Topic
1. Understand the centrality and importance of San Francisco's Chinatown.
2. Explore how cities develop organically and strategically.
3. Utilize a simulation activity to see how cities grow.
Objectives
9th to 12th Human Geography, World, and U.S. History
On level through Advanced Placement and the International Baccalaureate
Grade
Essential Questions
How do cities develop?
Why does location matter?
Overview
San Francisco Chinatown - after 1910
This lesson relates to information found in Look Up, Scene 1: Something In Between, Scene 2: Look Tin Eli's Pie, Scene 3: The Longest 60 Seconds, Scene 4: Chinese Beautiful is Born, Scene 5: Look Up from the CMM Chinatown Walk.
This lesson plan leads students through a simulation centered around how cities develop to help them understand how San Francisco's geography and history contributed to the development of Chinatown in its central location.
Sitting at the opening of the Golden Gate the San Francisco sits surrounded on three sides where the Bay and the Pacific Ocean meet. Often covered in fog, Sir Francis Drake sailed right past San Francisco landing in Marin on 17 June 1579, the peninsula protects a vitally important natural harbor for Pacific trade routes. Relatively moderate and consistent weather allows for year-round travel, and the rivers which travel into the San Joaquin Delta and Bay stretching as far south as San Jose extends the extensive trade routes while increasing the central importance of San Francisco as the hub.
On 24 January 1848 James Marshall discovered gold in Sutter's Creek in what would become Sacramento making the port of San Francisco even more attractive and vitally important. Eight days later the U.S. took possession of California in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the sleepy Spanish outpost turned into a boomtown of epic proportions with people flooding in and through the City, including a sizable Chinese migrant population settling into what would be quickly known as Chinatown, called Gold Mountain by the Chinese.
Bun Sun Low restaurant interior, San Francisco Chinatown - circa 1888
Key Ideas
1. Understand the centrality and importance of San Francisco’s Chinatown
2. Explore how cities develop organically and stragicalls
3. Use a simulation activity to see how cities grow
Assessment
Students will create their own urban map of San Francisco.
Materials
10 x 13 blank paper, pencil, and eraser.
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Pass out the materials for the San Francisco urban game. Each student should have one piece of paper and a pencil.
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The San Francisco Urban Game (Slides)
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Pass out maps of San Francisco (Past - 1885; Current - 2022). Allow students to compare their maps with the map of the City and allow students to discuss their thoughts on the game. How did the City develop? What was the most important and central location to the growth of San Francisco? What is the one thing they would change about how the City developed?
Lesson (75 Minutes Total):
Standards:
Historical and Social Science Analysis Skills (p727-728)
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Students compare the present with the past, evaluating the consequences of past events and decisions and determining the lessons that were learned.
Students analyze how change happens at different times; understand that some aspects can change while others remain the same; and understand that change is complicated and affects not only technology and politics but also values and beliefs.
Students use a variety of maps and documents to interpret human movement, including major patterns of domestic and international migration, changing environmental preferences and settlement patterns, the frictions that develop between population groups, and the diffusion of ideas, technological innovations, and goods.
Students relate current events to the physical and human characteristics of places and regions.
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Students identify bias and prejudice in historical interpretations.
Students construct and test hypotheses; collect, evaluate, and employ information for multiple primary and secondary sources; and apply it in oral and written presentations.
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Students show the connections, casual and otherwise, between particular historical events and larger social, economic, and political trends and developments.
Students recognize the complexity of historical causes and effects, including the limitations on determining cause and effect.
Students interpret past events and issues within the context in which an event unfolded rather than soley in terms of present day norms and values.
Students understand the meaning, implication. and impact of historical events and recognize that events could have taken other directions.
Students analyze human modifications of landscapes and examine the resulting environmental policy issues.
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10.4 Students analyze patterns of global change in the era of New Imperialism in at least two of the following regions or countries: Atrica, Southeast Asia, China, India, Latin America, and the Philippines.
Describe the rise of industrial economies and their link to imperialism and colonialism (e.g., the role played by national security and strategic advantage; moral issues raised by the search for national hegemony, Social Darwinism, and the missionary impulse; material issues such as land, resources, and technology).
Explain imperialism from the perspective of the colonizers and the colonized and the varied immediate and long-term responses by the people under colonial rule.
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11.2 Students analyze the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large scale rural-to-urban migration. and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
2. Describe the changing landscape, including the growth of cities linked by industry and trade and the development of cities divided according to race ethnicity and class.
6. Trace the economic development of the United States and its emergence as a major industrial power. including its gains from trade and the advantages of its physical geography.
11.4 Students trace the rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century.
1. List the purpose and the effects of the Open Door Policy.
11.5 Students analyze the major political, social, economic, technological, and cultural developments of the 1920s.
4. Discuss the rise of mass production techniques, the growth of cities, the impact of new technologies (e.g., the automobile, electricity), and the resulting prosperity and effect on the American landscape.