URBANIZATION BASICS
CITY SIZE & HIERARCHY
INSIDE THE CITY
SPRAWL & DENSITY
URBAN CHALLENGES
100
The process by which an increasing share of a population comes to live in cities.
What is urbanization? MC TIP — Urbanization is the PROCESS. Percent urban is the measure. Suburbanization is one direction the process takes.
100
The area surrounding a city that it serves and draws resources from.
What is the hinterland (market area)? MC TIP — Hinterland is the functional region around a central place. Its size depends on the goods the city offers.
100
The commercial heart of a city, with the highest land values and tallest buildings.
What is the central business district (CBD)? MC TIP — High land value plus competition for access produces vertical development. Bid-rent theory is the explanation AP wants.
100
The unplanned, low-density spread of urban development into surrounding rural land.
What is urban sprawl? MC TIP — Sprawl's costs: farmland loss, car dependence, longer commutes, higher infrastructure cost per resident. Name at least two.
100
Informal, self-built settlements on the edge of rapidly growing cities in the periphery.
What are squatter settlements (favelas, shantytowns)? MC TIP — Cause: rural-to-urban migration outpacing formal housing. The Latin American model puts them in the outer zone of disamenity.
200
The advantages firms gain by clustering near suppliers, skilled labor, and customers.
What are agglomeration economies? MC TIP — Agglomeration explains why similar businesses cluster instead of spreading out. It returns in Unit 7 as an industrial location factor.
200
The rule stating that the nth largest city is 1/n the size of the largest city.
What is the rank-size rule? MC TIP — A country following rank-size has a balanced, integrated urban system. A sharp break from it signals a primate city.
200
The economic theory that land value and demand decrease as distance from the CBD increases.
What is bid-rent theory? MC TIP — Bid-rent is von Thünen moved into the city. It underlies the CBD, the density gradient, and every concentric urban model.
200
A designated ring of protected rural land where urban development is prohibited.
What is a greenbelt? MC TIP — Greenbelts and urban growth boundaries are the CED's two anti-sprawl tools. Portland, Oregon is the U.S. example.
200
The concentration of poverty, unemployment, and disinvestment in a defined urban area.
What is a zone of abandonment (a cycle of disinvestment)? MC TIP — The chain: deindustrialization, then job loss, then a falling tax base, then failing services, then further out-migration.
300
The city plus its surrounding suburbs and the area functionally tied to it — the U.S. Census unit for a city region.
What is a metropolitan statistical area (MSA)? MC TIP — An MSA needs an urban core of at least 50,000. A micropolitan area has 10,000 to 50,000. Both are functional regions.
300
A city more than twice the size of the next largest, dominating a country economically and culturally.
What is a primate city? MC TIP — Bangkok, Paris, Mexico City. Primacy often traces to colonial administration and concentrated investment.
300
The movement of upper- and middle-income residents into a deteriorated inner-city neighborhood, raising property values.
What is gentrification? MC TIP — Always give both sides: reinvestment and lower crime versus displacement of long-time residents and loss of affordable housing.
300
Development that is compact, walkable, mixed-use, and transit-oriented — the planning response to sprawl.
What is smart growth (New Urbanism)? MC TIP — New Urbanism is criticized for being expensive and exclusive. AP asks for that critique, not just the definition.
300
Rapid population growth without the roads, water, sewer, and power capacity to support it.
What is inadequate infrastructure? MC TIP — Infrastructure lag is the CED's core explanation for informal settlements and urban service failures in the periphery.
400
Two or more metropolitan areas that have grown together into a continuous urban region, like Boston to Washington.
What is a megalopolis (conurbation)? MC TIP — The BosWash corridor is the standard example. It is a functional region spanning many political boundaries.
400
The minimum number of people needed to support a business or service.
What is the threshold? MC TIP — Threshold and range are the two central place terms. Threshold = minimum customers. Range = maximum distance they will travel.
400
The discriminatory practice of denying mortgages and insurance in neighborhoods based on racial composition.
What is redlining? MC TIP — Redlining plus blockbusting plus restrictive covenants produced lasting residential segregation. All three are named in the CED.
400
Reusing abandoned industrial or commercial sites, often requiring environmental cleanup.
What is brownfield redevelopment? MC TIP — Contrast with greenfield development on previously undeveloped land — which is what sprawl consumes.
400
The uneven distribution of environmental hazards, with polluting facilities concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods.
What is environmental injustice? MC TIP — The CED names environmental injustice directly. It is a scale question: a citywide average hides neighborhood exposure.
500
A city with disproportionate influence over the global economy, hosting corporate headquarters and financial markets.
What is a world (global) city? MC TIP — New York, London, Tokyo top the hierarchy. Global cities connect more strongly to each other than to their own hinterlands.
500
The maximum distance people will travel to obtain a good or service.
What is the range? MC TIP — High-order goods — a cardiologist, a stadium — have a high threshold and a long range, so there are few of them, spaced far apart.
500
A suburban node with its own concentration of offices, retail, and entertainment, usually at a highway interchange.
What is an edge city? MC TIP — Edge cities are the visible product of the automobile and suburbanization — the multiple-nuclei model made literal.
500
Concentrating housing and jobs along transit corridors to reduce car dependence.
What is transit-oriented development? MC TIP — It raises residential density near stations, which is the mechanism for lowering per-capita emissions.
500
Higher temperatures in a city than in surrounding rural areas, caused by pavement, buildings, and lost vegetation.
What is the urban heat island effect? MC TIP — Mitigation: tree canopy, green roofs, reflective surfaces. Name the cause and one fix.
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