| Term | Definition |
|---|
| City | Conglomeration of people and buildings clustered together to serve as a center of politics, culture, and economics. |
| urban | term to describe the buildup of the central city and the suburban realm |
| agricultural village | small, egalitarian village, where most of the population was involved in agriculture. Started 10,000 years ago |
| agricultural surplus | enable a formation of cities, coincides with social stratification excess of agricultural crops. |
| social stratification | enables formation of cities, differentiation of society based in classes of wealth, power, production, and prestige |
| leadership class | Group of decision-makers and organizers in early cities who controlled resources and lives of others. |
| first urban revolution | The innovation of the city, which occurred independently in five separate hearths. |
| mesopotamia | Region of great cities first urban hearth dating back from 3500 BCE |
| Nile River Valley | Second urban hearth dating back to 3200 BCE |
| Indus River Valley | Third urban hearth dating from 2200 BCE |
| Huang He River | fourth of the major urban hearths, dating to 1500 BCE |
| Mesoamerica | Fifth urban hearth dating to 200 BCE |
| acropolis | Literally "high point", an area above a city such as Greece where many would practice religious beliefs. |
| agora | Public spaces where citizens debated, lectured, judged each other, socialized, and traded in ancient Greece |
| site | The internal physical attributes of a place, including its absolute location, its spatial character and physical setting. |
| Forum | The focal point of Roman Public life, included the Colosseum in Rome. |
| situation | The city's relative location, its place in the region and world around it. |
| trade area | an adjacent region within which its influence is dominant. |
| rank-size rule | states that in a model urban hierarchy, the populaton of a city or town wil be inversely proportional to its rank in the hierarchy. |
| central place theory | Proposed by Christaller in "The Central Places in Southern Germany", explains how and where central places in the urban hierarchy should be functionally and spatially distributed with respect to one another. |
| Sunbelt phenomenon | The movement of millions of Americans from northern/northeastern states into the south/southwestern regions. |
| functional zonation | The division of a city ito different regions or zones for certain purposes or functions |
| central business district | The concentration of business and commerce in a city's downtown |
| central city | describes the urban area that is not suburban. Refers to the older city as apposed to new suburbs |
| suburb | An out lying, functionally uniform part of an urban area, and may be often adjacent to a city. |
| Suburbanization | The process lands that where previously outside the urban environment becomes urbanized. |
| concentric zone model | By Ernest Buress's study of Chicago in the 1920s, a constructed model labeling five concentric zones of a city defined by function. |
| urban realm | term to describe the spatial components of the modern metropolis, where each realm is a separate economic, social, and political entity. |
| Griffin-Ford model | model to describe Latin American city structure, having a central "spine" district |
| edge cities | Introduced by Joel Garreau, in order to describe the shifting focus of urbanization away from the CBD, characterized by extensive amounts of office space, and low residential homes. |
| disamenity sector | the poorest parts of cities that in extreme cases are not even connected to regular city services and are controlled by gangs or drug lords |
| McGee model | Model in which encompasses the southeast Asia region showing similar land patterns in medium cities |
| shantytowns | unplanned developments of crude dwellings and shelters made mostly of scrap wood, iron, and pieces of cardboard. |
| zoning laws | Legal restrictions on land use that determine what types of building and economic activities are allowed to take place in certain areas. |
| redlining | A real estate practice which obtain money by selling in only predominantly white neighborhoods property. |
| blockbusting | Rapid change in the racial composition of residential blocks in American cities that occurs when real estate agents stir fears of white flight neighborhoods. |
| commercialization | The transformation of an area of a city into an area attractive to residents and tourists alike in terms of economic activity |
| gentrification | The rehabilitation of deteriorated, often abandoned, housing of low-income inner-city residents. |
| tear-downs | Homes bought in many American suburbs which are torn down and replaced with much larger homes |
| McMansions | Homes referred to as such because of their "super size" and similarity in appearance to other homes |
| urban sprawl | unrestricted growth of urban areas of housing, commercial development, and and roads with little expense in urban planning |
| Gated communities | Restricted neighborhoods or subdivisions, often literally fenced in, where entry is limited to residents and their guests. |
| informal economy | Economic activity that is neither taxed nor monitored by the government, not included in the GNP |
| world cities | Dominant city in terms of its role in the global political economy. Not the biggest in terms of population or industrial output, but in strategic control of the world economy |
| 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 |
| spaces of consumption | Areas of a city, the main pupose of which is to encourage people to consume goods and services, driven primarily by the global media industry. |
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