Make it or Break it
Parks, bike trails, waterfronts, and public gathering spaces are examples of these features that cities invest in to increase livability and attract residents and businesses.
What are Amenities?
This process occurs when older urban neighborhoods are renovated and property values rise, often leading to the displacement of lower-income residents by wealthier newcomers such as young professionals with higher incomes.
What is Gentrification?
This urban climate phenomenon occurs when cities become significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas due to large amounts of pavement, buildings, and reduced vegetation.
What is the Urban Heat Island Effect?
In the United States, this nationwide population count conducted every ten years collects data on residents and housing to help governments understand population patterns.
What is the Census?
This term refers to a city or town with its own local government that has authority to provide services, collect taxes, and enforce local laws.
What is a municipality?
This urban planning movement promotes walkable neighborhoods, reduced reliance on automobiles, and sustainable development patterns designed to create more livable communities.
What is New Urbanism?
An area of a city where residents have limited access to affordable, nutritious food—often because grocery stores are absent and only convenience stores or fast food options are available—is known by this term.
What is a food desert?
This measurement estimates the amount of land and natural resources required to sustain a population’s lifestyle and consumption patterns.
What is Ecological Footprint?
Data expressed in numbers—such as population totals, income levels, or housing prices—is classified using this term in geographic analysis.
What is quantitative data?
Following the National Housing Act, banks and lenders often refused to issue mortgages in certain urban neighborhoods—particularly those with minority populations—by marking those areas as risky on maps. This discriminatory practice became known as this.
What is Redlining?
Within New Urbanist planning, this zoning strategy allows residential, commercial, and sometimes office spaces to exist within the same building or neighborhood to encourage walkability and reduce commuting distances.
What is Mixed-Use Zoning?
In the mid-20th century United States, some real estate agents exploited racial fears by convincing white homeowners to sell their homes cheaply because minority families were supposedly moving in, then reselling those homes at higher prices.
What is Blockbusting?
This term describes the pattern in which minority or low-income communities are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards such as pollution, waste facilities, or industrial sites.
What is Environmental Racism?
An urban planner trying to understand how residents feel about a proposed housing development might gather this type of data about opinions and experiences.
What is qualitative data?
When a city expands its official boundaries to incorporate surrounding suburbs or nearby unincorporated land—often to increase its tax base or manage growth—it is engaging in this process.
What is Annexation?
Instead of concentrating affordable housing in a single large complex, this housing strategy places smaller numbers of subsidized housing units throughout multiple neighborhoods within a city.
What is Scattered-Site Housing?
Abandoned industrial sites that may be contaminated by previous manufacturing activities are often referred to as these, and they commonly contribute to large neglected areas within cities.
What are Brownfields?
Cities that adopt policies such as urban infill development and limits on outward expansion to reduce the environmental impact of urban sprawl are often described with this planning strategy.
What are Slow-Growth Cities?
Geographers must choose the level at which they examine data—such as global, national, regional, or local—when interpreting patterns. This concept refers to that level of observation.
What is Scale of Analysis?
Passed in 1968 during the Civil Rights Movement, this federal law made it illegal to discriminate in the sale, rental, or financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and other protected categories.
What is the Fair Housing Act?
Large metropolitan areas attempting to coordinate housing, land use, and transportation systems—particularly when implementing transit-oriented development—often rely on this broader planning framework that coordinates policy across multiple municipalities.
What is Regional Urban Planning?
In many peripheral or developing countries, this demographic process contributes to the rapid growth of informal settlements and squatter communities on the edges of cities as people move in search of economic opportunities.
What is Rural-to-Urban Migration?
This zoning strategy protects natural landscapes and limits development—often through measures such as greenbelts—to reduce habitat destruction and control urban expansion.
What is Preservation Zoning?
An urban planner hoping to study ethnic composition between sections of a city would likely rely on this scale of analysis
What is Census Tract?
This federal program after World War II helped many veterans purchase homes through government-backed mortgages, contributing to rapid suburban growth while also worsening racial segregation through practices like white flight.
What is the GI Bill?