Geography Ch. 11

Basic sector

Bring money in from outside the community

Central business district (CBD)

• Center of an urban unit, where retail stores, offices, and cultural activities are concentrated.
• High accessibility (mass transit, central roads).
• High land values (high density utilization).

Central city

Part of the urban area contained within the suburban ring, it usually has official boundaries

Central place theory

Walter Christaller
• Developed to explain the size and distribution of settlements based on their roles as marketplaces

City

Multifunctional nucleated settlements.
• Central business district, both residential and nonresidential land uses.
Towns are smaller, less functional complexity.

Concentric Zone Model

• Developed by Ernest Burgess in 1920s.
• Five zones as a series of rings around a core CBD.

Edge city

are defined by their large nodes of office and commercial buildings and characterized by having more jobs than residents within their boundaries

Gentrification

Rehabilitation of housing in deteriorated inner-city areas by middle- and high-income groups

Megacities

Megalopolis

a continuously built-up region that stretches from north of Boston to south of Washington, D.C.

Metropolitan area

• Large-scale functional entity discontinuously built-up but operating as an economic whole.
• May contain multiple urbanized areas.

Multiple-Nuclei Model

• Developed in 1940s.
• Spread from several specialized nodes of growth.

Multiplier effect

• Increase in Basic sector employment leads to increase in Nonbasic sector employment.
• Size of effect determined by basic/nonbasic ratio

Non-basic sectors

Supply residents with goods and services

Peripheral Model

• Takes into account major changes in urban form since World War II, especially suburbanization.
• Supplements three earlier models.
• Describes land uses in peripheral belt around a city.
• Circumferential highway outside city center.
• Nodes on the peripheral belt are centers for employment or services.
New polycentric metropolis.

Primate city

Rank size rule is less applicable to countries with developing economies and those in which the urban system is dominated by a primate city.
Much larger and functionally more complex than any other city in the country.
• For Example, Seoul, Bangkok.

Rank-size Rule

• nth largest city of a national system of cities will be 1/n the size of the largest city.
• No national urban system exactly meets this requirement; it is an approximation.
• Russia and U.S. closely approximate it.

Sector Model

• Developed in 1930s.
• Sectors radiating outward from C BD along transportation corridors.

Shantytowns and Squatter Settlements

Growth of cities spurred by rural-to-urban migration of low-income residents seeking jobs.
Large numbers of people work in the “informal” sector.
Many new urbanites must live in shantytowns and squatter settlements on fringes of the city.
• Isolated from sanitary facilities and public utilities.
• Isolated from jobs in city center.

Site

Latitude and longitude or physical characteristics.
Classification of cities according to site characteristics:
• Break-of-bulk locations.
• Head-of-navigation/bay head.
• Railheads.

Situation

In relation to the physical and cultural characteristics of surrounding areas.
• Raw materials, market areas, agricultural regions, mountains, oceans, etc

Spatial mismatch

the poor and minorities are trapped in a central city without the possibility of nearby employment and are isolated by distance, immobility, and unfamiliarity from the few remaining low-skill jobs, which are now largely in the suburbs

Suburb

Functionally specialized segment of a large urban area outside the central city

Sunbelt

Threshold

minimum number of consumers needed to support its supply

Town

are smaller and have less functional complexity than cities, but they still have a nuclear business concentration

Urban

often used to describe such places as a town, city, suburb, or metropolitan area, but it is a general term, not used to specify a particular type of settlement

Urban hierarchy

• Ranking based on size and functional complexity.
• Structured like a pyramid.
• All centers at all levels in the hierarchy constitute an urban system.

Urban Influence Zone

• Areas outside a city that are affected by it.
• Usually proportional to size of city.
• Urban influence is affected by distance decay.

Urbanized area

Continuously built-up landscape defined by building and population densities with no reference to political boundaries

World cities

• Stand at top of national systems of cities.
• Interconnected, internationally dominant centers of global finance and commerce.
• London and New York are the dominant financial world cities.
• Major secondary cities include: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore, Shanghai, Chicago, Dubai, and Sydney.