Let's Get Urban!
This statistic measures the proportion of a country’s population living in cities rather than rural areas and is commonly used to compare levels of urbanization between countries.
What is Percent Urban?
Urban areas with populations exceeding about 20 million people—such as Tokyo or Lagos—are classified by geographers using this term.
What are Meta Cities?
This term refers to the maximum distance people are willing to travel to obtain a good or service, such as traveling farther for a major hospital than for a cup of coffee.
What is Range?
Cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo are considered highly influential because they serve as major centers of finance, culture, and international business within the modern trends of globalization. Geographers classify these cities using this term.
What are World/Global Cities?
This economic theory explains why land closer to the central business district is more expensive, helping geographers explain the pattern of land uses found in the Concentric Zone Model.
What is Bid-Rent?
A city located near a natural harbor, fertile land, and freshwater sources is benefiting from these physical characteristics of its location.
What is Site?
This term describes the ranking of settlements—from small hamlets and towns to major global cities—based on their population size, economic power, and the services they provide.
What is the Urban Hierarchy?
The minimum market population needed to support a service such as a gas station, grocery store, or movie theater is known by this term.
What is Threshold?
After World War II, a new trend of suburbanization accelerated as households gained access to this form of transportation, allowing people to commute longer distances from residential areas to jobs in the city.
What is the automobile?
This urban model proposes that cities grow outward in wedge-shaped sectors from the CBD, often following major transportation routes such as rail lines or highways.
What is the Hoyt-Sector Model?
Atlanta developed into a major city largely because multiple railroad lines intersected there, allowing goods and people to move efficiently across the region. This geographic concept describes a city’s relative location and connections to surrounding places.
What is Situation?
In the United States, the Census Bureau uses this classification for a large city with at least 50,000 residents and the surrounding counties that are economically linked to it through commuting patterns and shared labor markets.
What is Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)?
This model by Walter Christaller’s proposed that settlements are organized in a hierarchy of services and surrounded by hexagonal market areas called hinterlands.
What is Central Place Theory?
This model of spatial interaction predicts trends in connections between cities, predicting that larger cities will have stronger connections—such as migration, trade, or communication—while increasing distance weakens those interactions.
What is the Gravity Model?
This model describes many African cities as having three main parts: a colonial CBD, a traditional market zone, and rapidly expanding peripheral neighborhoods reflecting post-colonial urban growth.
What is the de Blij Model?
During the 19th century, millions of rural residents moved to cities as factories created concentrated employment opportunities and mechanized agriculture reduced rural labor needs. This economic transformation is considered the primary driver of rapid urbanization during this period.
What is industrialization?
As cities decentralized in the late 20th century, clusters of offices, retail centers, and corporate headquarters developed outside traditional downtowns in locations often accessible by highways. These suburban economic hubs are known by this term.
What are Edge Cities?
In a country that follows the rank-size rule, the largest city has a population of 12 million. Based on that pattern, what should the population of the 4th largest city be?
When suburban development trend jumps over undeveloped land and new neighborhoods appear farther from the urban center—often leaving empty land between developments—geographers describe this pattern with this term.
What is Leap-Frog Development?
In the McGee Model of Southeast Asian cities, this intensive-commercial agricultural zone located near the city specializes in producing perishable crops such as fruits and vegetables for nearby urban markets.
What is the Market-Gardening Sector?
In Borchert’s model of urban development, the late-19th-century transportation era associated with the rapid spread of the steam engine and railroads dramatically expanded the growth of cities farther inland in the American frontier, especially those in the Rust Belt and Midwest such as Chicago and Kansas City.
What is the Steamboat-Iron Horse Epoch?
Cities in the US Sun Belt such as Gilbert, Arizona, or Plano, Texas, have experienced extremely rapid population growth while remaining part of a larger metropolitan region rather than becoming independent major cities. These fast-growing suburban municipalities are known by this term.
What are Boomburbs?
This type of city dominates a country’s economy, politics, and culture so heavily that it outweighs other cities in both size and influence, often reflecting centralization within the state.
What is a Primate City?
An urban growth trend in which multiple metropolitan areas expand outward and merge into a single continuous urban corridor—such as the BosWash region along the U.S. East Coast—this process forms a massive urban region known as a megalopolis.
What is Conurbation?
In the Griffin-Ford model of Latin American cities, this area refers to neighborhoods where residents gradually improve housing over time rather than building it all at once, often starting with informal settlements on the outskits and slowly adding materials, infrastructure, and amenities towards the core
What is the Zone of In Situ Acretion