Cities and Urban Land Use Patterns and Processes Part 1 Flashcards
Ecumene
What the classical Greeks called the permanently inhabited portion of the earth’s surface, which is a variety of community types with a range of population densities.
Rural
Farms and villages with low concentrations of people.
Urban
Cities with high concentrations of people.
Suburbs
Primarily residential areas near cities.
Settlement
A place with a permanent human population.
Urbanization
The process of developing towns and cities. This is an ongoing process that does not end once a city is formed.
Percent Urban
An indicator of the proportion of the population that lives in cities and towns as compared to those that live in rural areas. This is a common statistic associated with regions, countries, and even continents.
Site
Describes the characteristics at the immediate location – for example, physical features, climate, labor force, and human structures.
Situation
Refers to the location of a place relative to its surroundings and its connectivity to other places.
City-State
This historically consisted of an urban center (the city) and its surrounding territory and agricultural villages. It had its own political system and functioned independently from other city-states. These communities were often raided by other groups for their wealth. As a result, defense was a primary consideration, and military leaders evolved into political rulers, or kings.
Urban Hearth
An area generally associated with defensible sites and river valleys in which seasonal floods and fertile soils allowed for an agricultural surplus.
Urban Area
Defined as a central city plus land developed for commercial, industrial, or residential purposes, and includes the surrounding suburbs.
City
A higher-density area with territory inside officially recognized political boundaries.
Metropolitan Area
Sometimes called a metro area, this is a collection of adjacent cities economically connected, across which population density is high and continuous.
Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)
Another way to define a city. An MSA consists of at least 50,000 people, the county in which it is located, and adjacent counties that have a high degree of social and economic integration, or connection, with the urban core.
Micropolitan Statistical Area
Cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants (but less than 50,000), the county in which they are located, and surrounding counties with a high degree of integration.
Nodal Region
A focal point in a matrix of connections.
Social Heterogeneity
The population of cities, as compared to other areas, contains a greater variety of people.
Time-Space Compression
The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place, as a result of improved communications and transportation system.
Borchert’s Transportation Model
A model developed by geographer John Borchert used to describe urban growth based on transportation technology.
Pedestrian Cities
Cities shaped by the distances people could walk.
Streetcar Suburbs
Communities that grew up along rail lines.
Suburbanization
Involves the process of people moving, usually from cities, to residential areas on the outskirts of cities.
Sprawl
The rapid expansion of the spatial extent of a city. This occurs for numerous reasons: growth of suburbs, lower land costs in suburbs compared to inner cities, lower density single family housing, weak planning laws, and the continuing growth of car culture.
Leap-Frog Development
Developers purchase land and build communities beyond the periphery of the city’s built area.
Boomburbs
Rapidly growing communities (over 10 percent per 10 years), have a total population of over 100,000 people, and are not the largest city in the metro area.
Edge Cities
Nodes of economic activity that have developed in the periphery of large cities. These usually have tall office buildings, a concentration of retail shops, relatively few residences, and are located at the junction of major transportation routes.
Counter-Urbanization (Deurbanization)
The counter-flow of urban residents leaving cities.
Exurbs
The prosperous residential districts beyond the suburbs.
Reurbanization
Suburbanites return to live in the city.
Megacities
Cities with a population of more than 10 million people.
Metacities
Also called hypercities, these are defined in two ways: continuous urban area with a population greater than 20 million people, and attributes of a network of urban areas that have grown together to form a larger interconnected urban system.
Megalopolis
A chain of connected cities.
Conurbation
An uninterrupted urban area made of towns, suburbs, and cities. The cities cross state boundaries and exceed the definition of a metropolitan area, which is focused on a single urban center. Although legally the major cities remain separate, they and their suburbs become a single region that takes on some characteristics of a single massive city.
World Cities (Global Cities)
Cities that exert influence far beyond their national boundaries.
Urban Hierarchy
A ranking based on influence or population size.
Nodal Cities
Command centers on a regional and occasionally national level.
Urban System
An interdependent set of cities that interact on the regional, national, and global scale.
Rank-Size Rule
A rule that describes one way in which the sizes of cities within a region may develop. It states that the nth largest city in any region will be 1/n the size of the largest city. That is, that the rank of a city within an urban system will predict the size of the city. For example, the third-largest city in a system that exhibits the rank-size distribution would be approximately one-third the size of the largest city.
Higher-Order Services
Services that are usually expensive, need a large number of people to support, and are only occasionally utilized.
Lower-Order Services
Services that are usually less expensive than higher-order services, require a small population to support, and are used on a daily or weekly basis.
Primate City
The largest city in an urban system has primacy or is a primate city if it is more than twice as large as the next largest city.
Gravity Model
A model that states that larger and closer places will have more interactions than places that are smaller and farther from each other.
Central Place Theory
A theory proposed by Walter Christaller to explain the distribution of cities of different sizes across a region. The model used consumer behavior related to purchasing goods and services to explain the distribution of settlements.
Central Place
A location where people go to receive goods and services.
Market Area
A zone that contains people who will purchase goods or services. It typically surrounds central places.
Hexagonal Hinterlands
Walter Christaller chose to depict market areas as hexagonal hinterlands because this shape was a compromise between a square, in which people living in the corners would be farther from the central place, and a circle, in which there would be overlapping areas of service.
Threshold
The size of population necessary for any particular service to exist and remain profitable.
Range
The distance people will travel to obtain specific goods or services.
