APHUG / AP Human Geo Vocab Units 6.1-6.4

Stole the vocab sheet from Evan, again. Your handwriting is worse than mine, and I don't even know how that's possible.

Ecumene

A portion of earth's surface that is permanently inhabited.

Rural

Areas of low concentrations of people, such as farms and villages.

Urban

Areas of high concentrations of people, such as cities

Suburbs

Residential areas near urban centres.

Settlement

Place with a permanent human population.

Urbanization

Devlopment of towns and cities

Percent urban

The proportion of the population that lives in cities compared to those that live in rural areas.

Site

The characteristics of an immediate location.

Situation

Location of the place relative to its surroundings and its connectivity to other places.

City-state

A sovereign independent state that consists of a single city and its immediate surrounding territory.

Urban hearth

Area generally associates with defendable sites and river valleys in which seasonal floods and fertile soils allowed for an agricultural surplus.

Urban area

Central city along with land developed for commercial, industrial, or residential purposes, and the surrounding suburbs

City

Higher density area with territory inside offially recognized political boundaries.

Metropolitan area

Collection of adjacent cities economically connected with a consistent and high population density.

Metropolitan statistical area (MSA)

An urban cluster consisting of fifty thousand or more people. Includes the county it's located in and the adjacent counties that have a high degree of social and economic integration or connection with the urban core.

Micropolitan statistical area

An urban cluster consisting of ten thousand to fifty thousand people. Includes the county it's located in and the adjacent counties that have a high degree of social and economic integration or connection with the urban core.

Nodal region

Focal point in a matrix of connections.

Social heterogeneity

Populations of cities has a greater variety of people compared to other cities.

Time-space compression

Shrinking of relative distance between locations because of imporved transportation and communication.

Borchert's transportation model

Framework that outlines the historical evolution of transportation systems in the US divided into distinct periods based on technological advancements and their urban development.

Pedestrain cities

Cities shaped by distances people could walk.

Streetcar suburbs

Communities taht grew up along streetcar lines.

Suburbanization

People moving from cities to residential areas on the outskirts of the city.

Sprawl

Rapid expansion of the spatial extent of a city

Leap-frog development

Developers purchase land an build communities beyond the periphery of the city's built area.

Boomburbs

Rapidly growing communities have a population of over one hundred thousand and are not the largest city in the metropolitan area

Edge cities

Nodes of economic activity that have developed in the periphery of large cities.

Counter-urbanization (Deurbanizataion)

Urban residents leaving cities.

Exurbs

Prosperous residential districts beyond the suburbs.

Reurbanization

Returning to live in the city.

Megacities

Cities with a population of more than ten million people.

Metacities

Cities with a population of more than twenty million and attributes of a network of urban areas that have grown together to form a larger interconnected urban system.

Megalopolis

The continuously developed string of cities.

Conurbation

Uninterrupted urban area made of towns, suburbs, and cities.

Global cities

Largest cities in the world.

Urban hierarchy

Ranking based on influence or population size.

Nodal cities (Functional region)

Command centers on a regional and occassionally national level. Are not as influential as global cities but possess significant power within a region of the country.

Urban system

Interdependent set of cities that interact on the regional, national, and global scale.

Rank-size rule

One way in which the sizes of cities in regions may develop.

Higher-order services

Expensive and need a large number of people to support and are occassionally utlilized.

Lower-order services

Less expensive and require a small population to support and are used on a daily or weekly basis.

Primate city

More developed than other cities in the system and disproportionately more powerful.

Gravity model

The larger and closer places are, the more interactions they will have.

Central place theory

Explaining the numbers, size, and location of human settlements based on market forces.

Central place

Where people go to recieve good and services.

Market area

Zone that contains people who will purchase goods or services.

Hexagonal hinterlands

Compromize between a square in which people were living in the corners would be farther from the central place and a circle in which there would be overlapping areas of service.

Threshold

The size of population necessary for any particular service to exist and remain profitable.

Range

Distance people will travel to obtain specific goods or services.