Vocab:

 Agglomeration - Clumping together of industries for mutual advantage.

 Barriadas - Squatter settlements found in the periphery of Latin American cities.
 Bid-Rent Theory- The price and demand for real estate changes as the distance towards the
Central Business District increases.
 Block busting - A process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their
houses at low prices because of fear that black families will soon move into the neighborhood.
 Central Business District(CBD) - The downtown heart of a central city, the CBD is marked by
highland values, a concentration of business and commerce, and the clustering of the tallest
buildings.
 Census Tract - Small county subdivisions, usually containing between 2,500 and 8,000 persons
delineated by the US census bureau as areas of relatively uniform population characteristics,
economics status, and living conditions.
 Centrality - The strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract produce and customers to its
facilities; a city’s “reach” into the surrounding religion.
 Central City - The urban area that is not suburban; generally, the older/original city that is
surrounded by newer suburbs.
 Central Place Theory - Theory proposed by Walter Christaller that explains how and where
central places in the urban hierarchy should be functionally and spatially distributed with respect
to one another.
 Walter Christaller - German geographer who in early 1930’s first formulated central place theory
as a series of models design to explain the spatial distribution of urban centers. Crucial to his
theory it is the fact that different good and services vary both in threshold and in range.
 City - people living in a large densely populated municipality.
 Cityscapes - Urban landscape; similar to a landscape, yet of a city (cityscapes often show the
city’s skyline, which is the CBD).
 Colonial City - City established by colonizing empires as administrative centers. Often, they were
established on already existing native cities, completely overtaking their infrastructures.
 Commercialization - marketing a product; the transformation of an area attractive to residents
and tourists alike in terms of economic activity.
 Commuter Zone - The outer most zone of the concentric model that represents people who
choose to live in residential suburbia and take a daily commute in the CBD to work.
 Concentric Zone Model - A model describing urban land uses as a series of circular belts or rings
around a core CBD, each ring housing a distinct type of use.
 Counter urbanization - Net migration from urban rural areas in MDC’s.
 Decentralization - The social process in which population and industry moves from urban centers
to outlying districts.
 Economic Base - The manufacturing and service activities performed by the basic sector of the
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 pop.
 Basic Sector - Those products or services of a urban economy that are exported outside the city
itself, earning income for the community.
 Non-Basic Sector - Those economic activities of a urban unit that supply the resident population
with goods and services that have no “export” implication.
 Edge City - Distinct sizeable model concentration of retail and office space of lower than central
city densities and situated outer fringes of older metropolitan areas; usually localized by or near
major highway intersections.
 Custom Area - Geographical are usually straddling to plus national boundaries in which specific
tariffs schedule is applied for incoming and outgoing goods.
 Entrepót - A port, city, or other center to which goods are brought for import/export and for
collection and distributing.
 Ethnic Neighborhood - An area within a city containing members of the same ethnic background.
 Favela - A slum community in a Brazilian city.
 Female Headed Household - A household dominated by a woman (MCDs have different family
structure).
 Festival Landscape - A landscape of cultural festivities.
 Gateway City - Cities that, because of their geographic location, act as ports of entry and
distribution centers for large geographic areas.
 Gender - The properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles.
 Gentrification - The restoration of run-down urban areas by the middle class (resulting in the
displacement of lower-income people).
 Ghetto - A poor densely populated city district occupied by a minority ethnic group linked
together by economic hardship and social restrictions.
 Globalization - A city with a population of more than 1 million.
 High Tech Corridors - An area along a limited-access highway that houses offices and other
services associated with high-tech industries.
 Hinterland - The market area surrounding an urban center, which that urban center serves.
 Indigenous City - A center of population, commerce, and culture that is native to a country.
 Informal Sector - The portion of an economy largely outside government control in which
employees work without contracts or benefits.
 Infrastructure - The stock of basic facilities and capital equipment needed for the functioning of a
country or area.
 Inner City - The older and more populated and (usually) poorer central section of a city
 Invasion and succession - Process by which new immigrants to a city move to and dominate or
take over areas or neighborhoods occupied by older immigrant groups.
 Megacities - Cities, mostly characteristic of the developing world, where high population growth
and migration have caused them to explode in population since World War II. All megacities are
plagued by chaotic and unplanned growth, terrible pollution, and widespread poverty.
 Megapolis - A very large urban complex (usually involving several cities and towns).
 Metropolitan Area - a major population center made up of a large city and the smaller suburbs
and towns that surround it.
 Multiple Nuclei Model - A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are
arranged around a collection of nodes of activities.
 Multiplier Effect - An effect in economics in which an increase in spending produces an increase
in national income and consumption greater than the initial amount spent.
 Neighborhood - People living near one another.
 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 region within a settlement with the greatest land value and
commerce. As such, it is usually located in the central business district of a town or city, and has
the greatest density of transport links such as roads and rail.
 Planned Communities - A city built to a definite plan.
 Postindustrial City - A city in which global finances and the electronic flow of information
dominate the economy.
 Postmodern Urban Design - Attempts to reconnect people to place through its architecture, the
preservation of historical buildings, the re-emergence of mixed land uses and connections among
developments.
 Primate City - A city that ranks first in a nation in terms of population and economy.
 Racialization - The practice of creating unequal castes where whiteness is considered the norm or
unexceptional.
 Rank-Size Rule - A pattern of settlements in a country, such that the nth largest settlement is 1/n
the population of the largest settlement.
 Redlining - Illegal practice of refusing to make mortgage loans or issue insurance policies in
specific areas for reasons other than economic qualifications of applicants.
 Restrictive Covenants - Provision in a property deed preventing sale to a person of a particular
race or religion; loan discrimination; ruled unconstitutional.
 Sector Model - A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged
around a series of sectors, or wedges, radiating out from the central business district (CBD).
 Settlement Form - The spatial arrangements of buildings roads, towns and other features that
people construct while inhabiting the area.
 Nucleated - A compact closely packed settlement sharply demarcated from adjoining farmland.
 Dispersed - In comparison with nucleated settlement, a dispersed settlement pattern characterized
by scattered, isolated dwellings.
 Elongated - A settlement that is clustered linearly along a street, river, etc.
 Shantytown - Little towns consisting largely of shacks that sprang up on outskirts of cities.
 Shopping Mall - Mercantile establishment consisting of a carefully landscaped complex of shops
representing leading merchandisers.
 Site - The physical character of a place.
 Situation - The location of a place relative to other places.
 Slum - A district of a city marked by poverty and inferior living conditions.
 “Social Stratification”- The condition of being arranged in social strata or classes within a group.
 Suburb – A residential district located on the outskirts of a city.
 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. Late-twentieth-century coequal to the American central
city's Central Business District.
 Suburbanization - The process of population movement from within towns and cities to the rural-
urban fringe.
 Symbolic Landscape - Smaller landscapes that symbolize a bigger area or category. iconic
landscapes, i.e. the state capitol symbolizes WI. every landscape can symbolize something, but
these are focal points for people's attention.
 Threshold - The minimum number of people needed to support the service.
 Range - The maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service.
 Underclass - A group in society prevented from participating in the material benefits of a more
developed society because of a variety of social and economic characteristics.
 Underemployment - The condition when people work at jobs for which they are overqualified or
that do not utilize their skills.
 Urban Form - The physical characteristics that make up built-up areas, including the shape, size,
density and configuration of settlements. It can be considered at different scales: regional, urban,
neighborhood, block and street.
 Urban Hearth Area - An area, like Mesopotamia or the Nile River Valley where large cities first
existed.
 Urban Hierarchy - a ranking of settlements (hamlet, village, town, city, metropolis) according to
their size and economic functions.
 Urban morphology - The study of the physical form and structure of urban places.
 Urbanization - The social process whereby cities grown and societies become more urban.
 Urbanized Population - The proportion of a country's population living in cities.
 Urbanized Sprawl - Unrestricted growth in many American urban areas of housing, commercial
development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning.
 World City - Centers of economic, culture, and political activity that are strongly interconnected
and together control the global systems of finance and commerce.
 Zone - Areas with relatively uniform land use, for example, an industrial zone or a residential
zone.
 Zone of Transition - An area that is either becoming more rural or more urban.
 Zoning Laws - Legal restrictions on land use that determine what types of building and economic
activities can take place in certain areas. In the US, areas are most commonly divided into
separate zones of residential, retail, or industrial use.