AP Human Geography: Cities and Urban Land Use Patterns

Flashcards covering key terminology and concepts related to cities and urban land use patterns in AP Human Geography.

Urbanization

An increase in the percentage and in the number of people living in urban settlements.

Megacities

Cities with more than 10 million people.

Suburbanization

The process of population movement from within towns and cities to the rural-urban fringe.

Edge City

Cities that are located on the outskirts of larger cities and serve many of the same functions of urban areas, but in a sprawling, decentralized suburban environment.

Exurbs

Communities that arise farther out than the suburbs and are typically populated by residents of high socioeconomic status.

Boomburgs

An outlying residential district of a city that is expanding rapidly.

Rank-Size Rule (Zipf's Law)

A pattern of settlements in a country, such that the nth largest settlement is 1/n the population of the largest settlement.

Primate City

The largest settlement in a country, if it has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement.

Gravity Model

Populations in different geographic regions interact and influence each other in proportion to how close they are to each other.

Central Place Theory

Theory proposed by Walter Christaller that explains how and where central places in the urban hierarchy should be functionally and spatially distributed with respect to one another.

Concentric Zone Model

A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are spatially arranged in a series of rings.

Sector Model

A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a series of sectors, or wedges, radiating out from the central business district (CBD).

Multiple Nuclei Model

A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a collection of nodes of activities.

Galactic City Model

A mini edge city that is connected to another city by beltways or highways.

Bid Rent Theory

Different land users are prepared to pay different amounts, the bid rents, for locations at various distances from the city center.

New Urbanism

A movement in urban planning to promote mixed-use commercial and residential development and pedestrian-friendly, community-oriented cities.

Greenbelts

A ring of land maintained as parks, agriculture, or other types of open space to limit the sprawl of an urban area.

Redlining

A discriminatory real estate practice in North America in which members of minority groups are prevented from obtaining money to purchase homes or property in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Blockbusting

A process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their houses at low prices due to fear that persons of color will soon move into the neighborhood.

Gentrification

A process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominantly low-income renter-occupied area to a predominantly middle-class owner-occupied area.