| A | B |
|---|
| Agglomeration | A process involving the clustering or concentrating of people or activities. The term often refers to manufacturing plants and businesses that benefit from close proximity because they share skilled labor pools and technological and financial amenities |
| 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 people of color to move to previously white neighborhoods. In the resulting outmigration, real estate agents profit through the turnover of properties. |
| Central Business District (CBD) | The downtown heart of a central city that is marked by high land values, a concentration of business and commerce, and the clustering of the tallest buildings |
| 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 regions |
| Central-Place Theory | Explains how and where central places in the urban hierarchy should be functionally and spatially distributed with respect to one another |
| City | Conglomeration of people and buildings clustered together to serve as a center of politics, culture and economics |
| Commercialization | The transformation of an area of a city into an area attractive to residents and tourists alike in terms of economic activity |
| Concentric Zone Model | A structural model of the American central city that suggests the existence of five concentric land-use rings arranged around a common center |
| Deindustrialization | Process by which companies move industrial jobs to other regions with cheaper labor, leaving the region to switch to a service economy and work through a period of high unemployment |
| Edge Cities | term used to describe the shifting focus of urbanization in the United States away from the central business district toward new loci of economic activity at the urban fringe. These areas are characterized by extensive amounts of office and retail space, few residential areas and modern buildings |
| Ethnic neighborhood | neighborhood, typically situated in a larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs |
| Gentrification | The rehabilitation of deteriorated, often abandoned, housing of low-income inner-city residents |
| Globalization | the expansion of economic, political and cultural processes to the point that they become global in scale and impact |
| Hinterland | Literally "country behind" a term that applies to a surrounding area served by an urban center |
| Megalopolis | Term used to designate large coalescing supercities that are forming in diverse parts of the world |
| Primate City | A country's largest city-ranking atop the urban hierarchy-most expressive of the national culture and usually the capital city as well |
| 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 discriminatory real estate's practice in North America in which members of minority groups are prevented from obtaining money to purchase homes or property in predominantly white neighborhoods. Today it is officially illegal. |
| Site | The internal physical attributes of a place, including its absolute location, its spatial character and physical setting |
| Situation | The external location attributes of a place, its relative location or regional position with reference to other nonlocal places |
| 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 |
| 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. |
| Urban Hierarchy | A ranking of settlements according to their size and economic functions |
| Urban Morphology | The study of the physical form and structure of urban places |
| Level of Urbanization | The proportion of a country's population living in urban places. |
| Process of Urbanization | The movement of people to and the clustering of people in, towns and cities- a major force in every geographic realm today |
| Urbanization | When a expanding city absorbs the rural countryside and transforms it into suburbs. |
| World City | Dominant city in terms of its role in the global political economy. |
| Zone | Area of a city with a relatively uniform land use. |
| Census Tract | Urban areas in the US are divided into these that contain approximately 5,000 residents and correspond, when possible, to neighborhood boundaries |
| Economic Base | A community's collection of basic industries |
| Ghetto | A section of a city in which members of any minority group live because of social, legal or economic pressure |
| Multiple nuclei model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a collection of nodes of activities |
| 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. |
| Squatter Settlement | An area within a city in a less developed country in which people illegally establish residences on land they do not own or rent and erect homemade structures |
| 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 economical factors |
| Barriadas | Illegal housing settlements, usually made up of temporary shelters, that surround large cities, also known as squatter settlements |
| Cityscapes | An urban landscape |
| Decentralization | The tendency of people or businesses and industry to locate outside the central city |
| Hydraulic civilization | A civilization based on large-scale irrigation |
| In-filling | New building on empty parcels of land within a checkerboard pattern of development |
| Megacities | A term that refers to a particularly large urban center |
| 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 bulidings, usually located along an interstate, often forming the nucleus of an edge city |
| Restrictive Covenants | A statement written into a property deed that restricts the use of the land in some way, often used to prohibit certain groups of people from buying property |
| Settlement forms | The spatial arrangement of bulidings, roads, towns, and other features that people construct while inhabiting an area |
| Symbolic Landscape | Landscapes that express the values, beliefs and meanings of a particular culture |
| Urban Hearth Area | A region in which the world's first cities evolved |
| Urbanized Population | The proportion of a country's population living in cities |
| Informal sector | The part of a national economy that involves productive labor not subject to formal systems of control or payment |
| Infrastructure | The basic structure of services, installations, and facilities needed to support industrial, agricultural and other economic development |
| Metropolitan Area | In the United States, a large functionally integrated settlement area comprising of one or more whole county units and usually containing several urbanized areas |
| Peak Value Intersection | The most accessible and costly parcel of land in the central business district and therefore in the entire urbanized area |
| Town | A nucleated settlement that contains a central business district but that is small and less functionally complex than a city |
| Bid-rent Theory | Geographical economic theory that refers to how the price and demand for real estate changes as the distance from the Central Business District decreases |
| Centralization | The process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning decision-making, become concentrated with in a particular location and/or group |
| Colonial city | Cities that arose in societies that fell under the domination of Europe and North America in the early expansion of the capitalist world system |
| Counterurbanization | Net migration from urban to rural areas in more developed countries |
| Employment structure | The percentage of people employed in each of the four major employment sectors |
| Favela | Term used for a shanty town in Brazil |
| Female Headed Household | Single mother with children |
| Gateway City | A settlement which acts as a link between two areas |
| Indigenous City | Originating in and naturally living, growing or occurring in a region or country |
| Inner City | The usually older, central part of a city, especially when characterized by crowded neighborhoods that tend to be low income and minority dominated |
| Lateral Commuting | Traveling from one suburb to another in going between home and work |
| Planned Communities | A residential district that is planned for a certain class of residents |
| Postmodern Urban Landscape | 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 |
| Shopping Mall | A shopping center with stores and businesses facing a system of enclosed walkways |
| Slum | Heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor |
| Tenement | Rundown apartment house barely meeting minimal standards |
| Urban Growth Rate | The process by which thre is an increase in proportion of a population living in places classified as urban |
| Urban Heat Island | Metropolitan area which there is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas |
| Forward Capital | A symbolic relocation of a capital city to a geographically or demographically peripheral location that may or may not be for either economic or strategic reasons |
