unit 6 vocab

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts related to cities and urban land use, focusing on definitions of terms important for understanding urban geography.

Urbanization

The process through which cities grow, and higher percentages of the population live in urban areas.

Metropolitan Area

The entire built city and its population, including suburban areas.

World City

A dominant city in the global political economy, acting as a center of strategic control.

Megacity

An urban settlement with a total population exceeding 10 million people.

Metacity

An urban settlement with a total population over 20 million people.

Megalopolis

A network of high-density human settlements formed by overlapping urban development.

Primate City

A country's largest city, representing the national culture and often the capital.

Rank Size Rule

A pattern of settlements where the nth largest settlement has a population that is 1/n of the largest settlement.

Central Business District (CBD)

The area of a city where retail and office activities are clustered, usually characterized by high land values.

Disamenity Sector

The poorest parts of cities, often not connected to regular city services and controlled by gangs or drug lords.

Ghetto

An urban region marked by particular ethnic, racial, and economic properties, often a low-income area.

Squatter Settlement

An area within a city in a less developed country where residents illegally establish homes on land they do not own.

Suburbanization

The movement of upper- and middle-class people from urban areas to suburban outskirts.

Gentrification

The process of converting a predominantly low-income urban neighborhood into a middle-class area.

Commercialization

The transformation of an urban area to attract residents and tourists for economic activity.

New Urbanism

A movement aimed at creating walkable neighborhoods with diverse housing and jobs to counter urban sprawl.

Gravity Model

A model suggesting that the potential use of a service is related to the number of people in an area and inversely related to the distance to the service.

Concentric Zone Model

A model describing the internal structure of cities with social groups arranged in a series of concentric rings.

Sector Model

A model that depicts social groups arranged in sectors radiating from the Central Business District.

Multiple Nuclei Model

A model of urban structure where social groups are arranged around multiple activity nodes.

Blockbusting

A process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their houses at low prices due to feat that black families will soon move into the neighborhoods.

McMansion

Homes are referred to as such because of their “supersize” and similarity to other such homes; homes are often built in place of tear-downs in American suburbs.

Zoning Laws

Legal restrictions on land use that determine what types of buildings and economic activities are allowed to occur in certain areas. In the United States, areas are most commonly divided into separate residential, retail, or industrial zones.