GEO 222 Urban Geography Vocabulary

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key urban geography concepts, theories, and analytical terms from the GEO 222 course materials.

Dialectic

A reciprocal relationship in which processes or forces shape one another.

Agency

The capacity to act and make choices within or against structural constraints.

Structure

Institutions and wider social arrangements that enable and constrain action.

Hegemony

Dominance maintained partly through consent and ideas that make a power arrangement seem normal.

Brownfield

Former industrial or commercial land that may be contaminated and require cleanup before reuse.

Gentrification

Neighborhood reinvestment and change toward wealthier residents or users; rising costs can displace existing residents.

Displacement

Being forced or pressured to leave a home, business location, or community.

Privatization

Transfer of public assets or services into private ownership or operation.

Deregulation

Reduction or removal of government rules governing an activity or industry.

Austerity

Policies reducing public spending and/or deficits, often affecting services and social provision.

Homogenization

Places or practices becoming more alike; global connections do not make every city identical.

Agglomeration

Advantages from economic activities, firms, and workers locating near one another.

Capital

Resources invested to generate returns.

Segregation

Structured or enforced separation of social groups in space.

Informal settlement

Housing developed outside some formal planning or legal systems, often with insecure tenure or services.

Urban entrepreneurialism

Governing a city to compete for investment, business, and prestige.

Social urbanism

Urban interventions linked to social inclusion, such as access-oriented transit and public spaces.

Digital divide

Unequal access to digital networks, devices, skills, or services.

Logistics

Coordination of the movement and storage of goods.

Containerization

Transport using standardized containers that transfer between ships, rail, and trucks.

Vulnerability

Susceptibility to harm shaped by exposure and capacity to cope.

Pathogen

An agent capable of causing disease.

Governance

Institutions and practices through which decisions are organized and implemented.

Livability

How well a place supports everyday needs, access, and quality of life.

Urbanization

An increasing share or proportion of a population living in urban areas, distinct from a mere rise in total city residents.

Urban growth

An increase in an urban population or its built area, which can occur without a rise in the national urban share.

Metropolitan region

A central city and surrounding places linked through commuting, employment, housing, trade, and services, often extending beyond official municipal borders.

Industrialization

Expansion of industrial production, often concentrating jobs and attracting workers into urban areas.

Globalization

Increasing connections and interdependence among places through trade, investment, migration, information, and other networks, producing uneven outcomes.

World city / global city

A strategically important center in international economic networks, especially through command, coordination, finance, and specialized services, rather than size alone.

Global circuit

A connected movement of money, people, goods, or information linking places across specialized networks.

Command functions

Decision-making about investment, production, and management that influences and coordinates economic activity in other locations.

Advanced producer services

Specialized services supporting firms, such as finance, law, accounting, and consulting, that help manage complex international operations.

Spatial division of labor

Different places performing different specialized economic tasks, such as manufacturing, corporate management, and services.

Surplus extraction

Capturing value generated through production beyond labor compensation and relevant production costs, helping organize profit, rent, and interest.

Colonialism

Direct political domination and control of a territory or people by an outside power.

Neocolonialism

Indirect influence or domination maintained through economic dependence, finance, trade, corporations, or political pressure without formal colonial rule.

Neoliberalism

A political-economic approach emphasizing markets, competition, privatization, deregulation, and often austerity, where the state enforces market institutions.

New International Division of Labor (NIDL)

The reorganization of production across countries, with different places specializing in tasks like manufacturing, management, and services under uneven bargaining power.

Washington Consensus

A set of market-oriented policy recommendations associated with international financial institutions, including privatization, liberalization, trade opening, and fiscal restraint.

Free trade

International exchange with reduced barriers such as tariffs or other trade restrictions.

Liberalization

Reforms opening economic activity to markets, competition, or investment.

Economic restructuring

Major changes in the organization of an economy, including its industries, production locations, and employment patterns.

Deindustrialization

A decline in industrial employment or activity, which can reduce jobs, population, and public resources in affected places.

Uneven development

Unequal patterns of growth, investment, and opportunity across places and social groups.

White flight

The movement of many white residents from central cities into suburbs, associated with segregation and shifts in tax resources and investment.

Redlining

Discriminatory area-based restrictions on housing credit, associated with racialized neighborhood risk grading.

The Green Book

A protective travel guide identifying businesses that Black travelers could use during segregation to reduce travel risks.

Citadel

In the urban course context, a privileged assemblage of residential and commercial spaces separated from the wider city.

Abandoned city

A course label for urban space experiencing severe disinvestment or exclusion, without necessarily meaning literally zero residents.

Tenement city

A course label emphasizing dense, overcrowded, poorly maintained multi-family housing and unequal urban conditions.

Mixed uses

Different activities located close together, such as housing, shops, and restaurants, attracting users at different times.

Sidewalk ballet

Jane Jacobs's description of the patterned but spontaneous interactions of residents, workers, shoppers, and visitors that organize daily street life.

Eyes on the street

Informal observation of public space by residents, shopkeepers, passersby, and people in nearby buildings, supported by daily public life.

Informal social control

Everyday observation and shared expectations that help regulate behavior without relying solely on formal authorities.

Top-down planning

Urban decision-making led by centralized, powerful institutions or authorities, often distributing costs and benefits unevenly.

Automobility

The wider socio-technical system supporting car travel, including vehicles, roads, laws, planning priorities, cultural expectations, and related industries.

Jaywalking

A politically and culturally constructed label that redefined acceptable pedestrian behavior and assigned crash responsibility to pedestrians.

Public space

Space used for shared or public activities, where formal openness does not guarantee that all social groups feel welcome or can participate.

Built environment

Human-made surroundings, including buildings, streets, infrastructure, and other constructed spaces.

Hostile design

Physical design that discourages selected activities or users, potentially excluding people from nominally public space.

Urbanity

The everyday social experience of living in a city, encompassing encounters, routines, relationships, and daily activities.

Representation

How a city is portrayed through media, tourism, branding, maps, or advertising, which may contrast with residents' actual experiences.

Space of flows

Manuel Castells's concept for the networked organization of information, capital, goods, and coordination across distance.

Space of places

Manuel Castells's concept for lived locations where people experience daily life, form relationships, and create social meaning.

Network society

Social organization strongly shaped by networks connecting activities, people, and institutions across distance.

Node

A connection point within a network, such as a city, airport, office center, or port.

Fiber optics

Telecommunications technology transmitting information as light through thin glass fibers, forming the physical routes of digital networks.

Selective connectivity

Stronger network connections provided for favored users or places, while neighboring areas are bypassed or underserved.

Sanitation

Systems and practices for managing waste safely and protecting public health.

Infrastructure

Underlying systems enabling urban activity, including water, sewers, transport, energy, and telecommunications, requiring funding, authority, and maintenance.

Miasma theory

A historical explanation that attributed infectious diseases like cholera to foul or poisonous air rather than microorganisms.

Germ theory

The medical understanding that microorganisms cause infectious disease, establishing that cholera spreads primarily through contaminated water or food.

Land reclamation

Creating usable land from water, marshes, or wet areas, expanding building space while altering drainage and ecological conditions.

Density

The number of people or amount of activity per unit area, which alone cannot explain disease, flood risk, or livability.

Shipbreaking

Dismantling retired ships to recover materials like steel, often involving hazardous labor and environmental burdens in global logistics nodes.

Externalized cost

A burden or harm borne by people outside a transaction, such as worker injury or pollution, not reflected in the market price.

Smart city

A city or development utilizing digital technology, data, and communications to manage functions, though not inherently guaranteeing inclusion.

Accessibility

The ability to reach and use opportunities, destinations, and services, shaped by structural barriers beyond simple travel capacity.

Mobility

The ability and physical conditions of movement, which does not by itself guarantee access or inclusion.

Belonging

Being accepted as part of a place or social group, which physical presence or legal citizenship alone does not automatically create.

Othering

Representing or treating people as outside an assumed 'us' through suspicion, stereotypes, harassment, or everyday spatial treatment.

Ordinary cities

Jennifer Robinson's concept that all cities produce valuable urban knowledge and should not be viewed merely as deficient copies of dominant global models.

Environmental inequality

Unequal exposure to pollution and hazards, along with unequal coping capacity and protection across different communities.