Urbanization Vocabulary Terms (Chapter 9)
AP Human Geography
Agglomeration - the spatial grouping of people or activities for mutual benefit; a process involving the clustering or concentrating of people or activities.
Barriadas - illegal housing settlements, usually made up of temporary shelters, that surround large cities; often referred to as a squatter settlement.
Bid-Rent Theory - the amount of land different land users are prepared to pay for locations at various distances form the city center. The result is a tendency for a concentric pattern of land uses.
Blockbusting - rapid change in the racial composition of residential blocks in American cities that occurs when real estate agents and others stir up fears of neighborhood decline after encouraging Ethnic minorities (African-American) to move to previously white neighborhoods. In the resulting out migration, real estate agents profit through the turnover of properties.
CBD - the downtown hear of a central city, marked by high land values, a concentration of business and commerce, and the clustering of the tallest buildings; the central nucleus of commercial land use in a city.
Census Tract - small districts used by the U.S. Census Bureau to survey the population.
Centrality - the strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract producers and consumers to its facilities; a city’s “reach” into the surrounding region; the functional dominance of cities within an urban system.
Central City - the urban area that is not suburban; generally, the older or original city that is surrounded by the suburbs.
Central Place Theory - a theory that seeks to explain the relative size and spacing of towns and cities as a function of people’s shopping behavior.
Christaller, Walter - German geographer who in the early 1930s first formulated central-place theory as a series of models designed to explain the spatial distribution of urban centers. Crucial to his theory is the fact that different goods and services vary both in threshold and in range
City - a multifunctional nucleated settlement with a central business district and both residential and nonresidential land uses.
Cityscapes - an urban landscape.
Colonial city - a city founded by colonialism or an indigenous city whose structure was deeply influenced by Western colonialism.
Commercialization - the transformation of an area of a city into an area attractive to residents and tourists alike in terms of economic activity.
Commuter zone - the outer most zone of the Concentric zone model that represents people who choose to live in residential suburbia and take a daily commute into the CBD to work.
Concentric zone model - a model describing urban land uses as a series of circular belts or rings around a core central business district, each ring housing a distinct type of land use.
Counterurbanization - the net loss of population from cities to smaller towns and rural areas.
Decentralization - the tendency of people or businesses and industry to locate outside the central city.
Economic base (basic/nonbasic) - the manufacturing and service activities performed by the basic sector of a city’s labor force; functions of a city performed to satisfy demands external to the city itself and, in that performance, earning income to support the urban population.
Basic sector - those products or services of an urban economy that are exported outside the city itself, earning income for the community.
Nonbasic sector - (syn: service sector) those economic activities of an urban unit that supply the resident population with goods and services and that have no “export” implication.
Edge city - distinct sizable nodal concentration of retail and office space of lower than central city densities and situated on the outer fringes of older metropolitan areas; usually localized by or near major highway intersections.
Entrepót - (French for warehouse) a trading center, or simply a ware house, where merchandise can be imported and exported without paying import duties, often at a profit. This profit is possible because of trade conditions, for example, the reluctance of ships to travel the entire length of a long trading route, and selling to the entrepot instead. The entrepot then sells at a higher price to ships traveling the other segment of the route. Today, this use has mostly been supplanted by custom areas.
Custom area - an area designated for storage of commercial goods that have not yet cleared customs. It is surrounded by a customs border. Most international airports and harbors have designated customs area, sometimes covering the whole facility and including extensive storage warehouses.
Ethnic neighborhood - neighborhood, typically situated in larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs.
Favela - the Brazilian equivalent of a shanty town, which are generally found on the edge of the city. They have electricity, but often not formally. They are constructed from a variety of materials, ranging from bricks to garbage. The most infamous ones are located in Rio de Janeiro.
Female-headed household - Which group (ethnic) in the United States is mostly likely to be headed by a female? Give statistics for your answer.
Festival setting - a multi use redevelopment project that is built around a particular setting, often one with a historical association.
Gateway city - a city that serves as a link between one country or region and others because of its physical situation.
Gender - the social differences between men and women rather than the anatomical differences that are related to sex.
Gentrification - the invasion of older, centrally located working-class neighborhoods by higher-income households seeking the character and convenience of less expensive and well-located residences; a process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominately low-income renter-occupied area to a predominately middle-class owner-occupied area.
Ghetto - during the Middle Ages, a neighborhood in a city set up by law to inhabited only by Jews; now used to denote a section of a city in which members of any minority group live because of social, legal, or economic pressure.
Globalization - actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope.
High-tech corridors - areas along or near major transportation arteries that are devoted to the research, development, and sale of high-technology products. These areas develop because of the networking and synergistic advantages of concentrating high-technology enterprises in close proximity to one another. “Silicon Valley” is a prime example of a high-technology corridor in the United States.
Hinterland - the sphere of economic influence of a town or city.
Indigenous culture- a culture group that constitutes that original inhabitants or a territory, distinct form the dominant national culture, which is often derived rom colonial occupation.
Informal sector - economic activities that take place beyond official record, not subject to formalized systems of regulation or remuneration.
Infrastructure - (or fixed social capital) the underlying framework of services and amenities needed to facilitate productive activity.
Inner city - the central area of a major city; in the United States the term is often applied to the poorer parts of the city center and is sometimes used as a euphemism with the connotation of being an area, perhaps a ghetto, where people are less educated and wealthy and where there is more crime.
Invasion and succession - process by which new immigrants to a city move to dominate or take over area or neighborhoods occupied by older immigrant groups. For example, in the early twentieth century, Puerto Ricans “invaded” the immigrant Jewish neighborhood of East Harlem an successfully took over the neighborhood or “succeeded” the immigrant Jewish population as the dominant group in the neighborhood.
Megacities - a very large city characterized by both primacy and high centrality within its national economy.
Megalopolis / conurbation - a large, sprawled urban complex with contained open, nonurban land, created through the spread and joining of separate metropolitan areas; When capitalized, the name applied to the continuous functionally urban area of coastal northeastern United States from Maine to Virginia.
Metropolitan area - In the United States, a large functionally integrated settlement area comprising one or more whole county units and usually containing several urbanized areas: discontinuously built up, it operates as a coherent economic whole.
Multiple nuclei model - the postulate that large cities develop by peripheral spread not from one central business district but from several nodes of growth, each of specialized use. the separately expanding use districts eventually coalesce at their margins.
Multiplier effect - the direct, indirect, and induced consequences of change in an activity; in urban geography, the expected addition of nonbasic workers and dependents to a city’s total employment and population that accompanies new basic sector employment.
Neighborhood - a small social area within a city where residents share values and concerns and interact with one another on a daily basis.
Office Park - a cluster of office buildings usually located along an interstate, often forming the nucleus of an edge city.
Peak land value intersection - the most accessible and costly parcel of land in the CBD and therefore in the entire urbanized area.
Planned communities - a city, town, or community that was designed from scratch, and grew up more or less following the plan. Several of the world's capital cities are examples, notably Washington, D.C. in the United States, Canberra in Australia, Brasília in Brazil, and Islamabad in Pakistan
Postindustrial (city) - a stage of economic development in which service activities become relatively more important than goods production; professional and technical employment supersedes employment in agriculture and manufacturing; and level of living is defined by the quality of services and amenities rather than by the quantity of goods available.
Postmodern urban design - a style characterized by a diversity of architectural styles and elements, often combined in the same building or project.
Primate city - a city of large size and dominant power within a country; a country’s largest city, ranking atop the urban hierarchy, most expressive of the national culture and usually (but not always) the capital city as well.
Racialization - the practice of categorizing people according to race, or of imposing a racial character or context.
Rank-size rule - in a model urban hierarchy, the idea that the population of a city or town will be inversely proportional to its rank in the hierarchy.
Redlining - a practice by banks and mortgage companies of demarcating areas considered to be a high risk for housing loans.
Restrictive convenants - a statement written into a property deed that restricts the use of land in some way; often used to prohibit certain groups of people from buying property.
Sector model - a description of urban land uses as wedge-shaped sectors radiating outward form the CBD along transportation corridors; the radial access routes attract particular uses to certain sectors, with high-status residential uses occupying the most desirable wedges.
Settlement forms:
nucleated - a relatively dense settlement form.
dispersed - a type of settlement form where people live relatively distant from each other.
elongated - a settlement that is long and narrow.
Shantytown - unplanned slum development on the margins of cities, dominated by crude dwellings and shelters made mostly of scrap wood, iron, and even pieces of cardboard.
Shopping malls - a building or set of buildings that contain stores, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk form store to store; the walkways may be enclosed.
Site - the local setting of a city.
Situation - the regional setting of a city.
Slum - a district of a city or town which is usually inhabited by the very poor or socially disadvantaged; can be found in large cities around the world; now interchangeable with ghetto, however, a ghetto refers to a neighborhood based on shared ethnicity; different from favelas or shantytowns in that they consist of permanent housing rather than less-durable shacks of cardboard or corrugated iron or newspaper.
"social stratification" - which refers to the idea that society is separated into different strata, according to social distinctions such as a race, class and gender. Social treatment of persons within various social structures can be understood as related to their placement within the various social strata.
Suburb - a subsidiary urban area surrounding and connected to the central city; many are exclusively residential; others have their own commercial centers or shopping malls.
Suburban downtown - significant concentration of diversified economic activities around a highly accessible suburban location, including retailing, light industry, and a variety of major corporate and commercial operations.
Suburbanization - movement of upper and middle-class people from urban core areas to the surrounding outskirts to escape pollution as well as deteriorating social conditions. In North America, the process began in the early nineteenth century and became a mass phenomenon by the second half of the twentieth century.
Symbolic landscape - landscapes that express values, beliefs, and meanings of a particular culture.
Threshold - in central-place theory, the size of the population required to make provision of services economically feasible.
Range - in central place theory, the average maximum distance people will travel to purchase a good or service.
Underclass - a subset of the poor, isolated from mainstream values and the formal labor market.
Underemployment - a situation in which people work less than full time even though they would prefer to work more hours.
Urban form - the physical structure and organization of cities.
Urban hearth area - a region in which the world’s first cities evolved.
Urban hierarchy - a ranking of settlements according to their size and economic function, e.g., hamlet - village - town - city - metropolis.
Urban morphology - the form and structure of cities, including street patterns and the size and shape of buildings.
Urbanization - the proportion of a country’s population living in a n urban area; the movement of people to, and clustering of people in, towns and cities--- a major force in every geographic realm today; occurs when an expanding city absorbs the rural countryside and transforms it into suburbs; in the case in the developing world, this also generates peripheral shantytowns.