AP Human - Unit 6 Vocab Examples: Cities and Urban Land-Use Patterns and Processes

Site

Physical features, climate, labor force, and human

structures

Situation

Gold mine, on the coast, or by the railroad

Boomburbs (Boomburgs)

Mesa, Arizona; Plano, Texas; and Riverside, California.

Metacities

Tokyo, Japan; New York City; Shenzhen, China

Megalpolis

The ""Bos-Wash Corridor"

Conurbation

The corridor in California from San

Diego through Los Angeles to San Francisco is a single, growing metropolitan corridor on the West Coast of the United States. Tokyo through Yokohama is a megalopolis in Japan.

World Cities

New York, Paris, London, Tokyo

Rank-Size Rule

The third-largest city in a system that exhibits the rank-size distribution would be approximately one-third the size of the largest city.

Primate City

The United Kingdom and London

Gravity Model

Cities such as Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada, are tourist destinations that attract far more visitors than their size and their distance from other cities alone could predict. Similarly, religious sites such as Jerusalem and Mecca, government centers such as Washington, DC, and various cultural destinations

Central Place Theory

Large cities like Chicago and Atlanta have a series of medium cities between them that are roughly the same distance from each other.

High-Order Services

Major sports teams, large malls, luxury car dealerships, and

large specialized research hospitals.

Low-Order Services

Gas stations, local grocery stores, or small restaurants.

Squatter Zones/Settlements

Kibera, on the western edge of Nairobi, Kenya.

Infrastructure

- transportation features, such as roads, bridges, parking lots, and signs

- communications features such as cell phone towers, television cables,

and Internet service

- distribution systems for water, gas, and electricity

- buildings, such as police stations, courthouses, and fire stations

- collection systems for sewage and garbage

- entertainment venues, such as museums, theaters, and sports facilities

- open spaces, such as public parks and town squares

Municipal

A mayor and city council or the local water supply

New Urban Design

Some strategies of new urbanism include creating human-scale neighborhoods

Quantitative Data

Geographers count the total population of

a country and sequence it with the total populations of other countries. This allows for comparison based on that particular data.