Explaining Urban Form

• City downtown, is explained by geographers as Central Business District (CBD).

  • It is the city’s social and cultural hub, economic engine, and political nerve center. Business, personal, and public services are usually all drawn to the area because of its high level of accessibility.

Urban Structure

• Part of how people experience cities is framed by the city’s urban structure, the generalized arrangement of land uses within the urban area.

• Urban land uses are broadly categorized into six types:

  1. residential,

  2. commercial,

  3. industrial,

  4. institutional,

  5. recreational, and

  6. transportation {including roads, parking lots, public transit, railways, and airports}

• An important concern in a city’s geography is where and in what numbers people live, work, shop, engage in recreational activities, etc.

  • The distribution of population densities tends to be remarkably consistent for all urban areas, bearing little relation to the internal structure.

• Value of land also characteristically decreases with increasing distance from the center.

• Land uses with the greatest values of economic rent at the city center will have steep rent lines and occupy land adjacent to the center.

Housing and Neighborhood

Housing Markets

• Housing is viewed in two ways:

  • as a commodity; is a major capital investment

  • and as a entitlement

• Some with a capitalist perspective, believe that housing is a consumer good to be bought and sold without any state intervention.

• Some with a socialist perspective, believe that it's government's responsibility to provide housing as a social service.

• It is analyzed in the context of market.

• The value of housing is affected by its spatial relationship with other urban land uses, and location where it's located. Including the following factors:

  • specific attributes like; lot size, bedroom - bathroom attachment, number of levels, amount of living space, and state of repair both outside and inside.

• The housing market responds to supply-and-demand considerations, this simple economic logic is disturbed by the market comprising many different participants who often display different political perspectives.

• Important constraints on individual residential location decisions are imposed especially by urban planners, speculators who hold land in anticipation of making a profit, developers and builders who regularly collaborate to influence neighborhood character and housing type, and real-estate agents, lawyers, and financiers, who frequently work to encourage sales in some areas of the city and not in others.

Residential Mobility

• Push factors include having too little living space and other perceived inadequacies in the design and quality of the home; these deficiencies frequently relate to the age of the home.

  • Additional push factors relate to neighborhood characteristics such as the availability of recreational facilities, good-quality schooling, ethnic composition, and likelihood of criminal activity.

• Pull factors can be generally viewed as the reverse of push factors, for example, the prospect of more living space, shorter commute times, better neighborhood amenities, and so on.

• Following are the factors underlying neighborhood decline and revitalization:

• While residential mobility refers to individuals’ decisions to change their place of residence within the city, filtering is the idea that, through time, a housing unit is occupied sequentially by people from steadily changing income groups.

  • The filtering concept can be applied at the level of the individual housing unit and at the neighborhood level.

• Housing can be one of the biggest personal capital investment, because many people may aim to earn income by buying and then selling their home at profit.

Gentrification

• It is the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, often displacing current inhabitants in the process.

• It has both positive and negative aspects.

  • Positive aspects:

    • represents a benefit for middle-class people who seek the character and architectural details that houses in these areas possess, as well as the convenience of living close to the city center.

    • also for them, it also represents an opportunity to exploit the differences between the actual and potential value of land.

  • Negative aspects:

    • gentrification for the poor, especially renters, represents a threat because rising house prices and property taxes may result in their displacement.

    • gentrification often contributes to greater social polarization, which can lead to social conflict as some inner-city residents actively resist gentrification.

Residential Segregation

• Most cities have residential areas that can be clearly distinguished on the basis of income, class, ethnicity, religion, or some other economic or cultural variable.

  • The process creating this spatial separation of distinct subgroups with the larger population is termed segregation.

    • These areas commonly include not only the subgroup members’ homes but also the social and cultural institutions, such as places of worship, schools, and businesses, that are an important part of social life.

• Distinct residential areas emerged in large immigrant receiving North Cities in the nineteenth, with divisions based on ethnicity and class.

• Segregation can also be based on religion.

Suburbs and Sprawl

Suburbanization

• Suburban growth was in response to changes taking taking place inside the city, including the establishment of factories and rising population densities.

• The favored locations outside the city were directionally biased along transportation routes, and new streetcar suburbs appeared around many large cities in Europe and North America during the second half of the nineteenth century.

  • This change was dramatically affected by the introduction of the automobile, which allowed access to the large areas of land that lay between the streetcar routes and meant that distance from the center of the urban area became the key variable rather than direction.

• Suburbanization was spread rapidly throughout the twentieth century, it was manly prevalent where land was readily available, planning were weak, populations were wealthy and could afford large homes, and levels of physical mobility were high.

• A symbiotic relationship existed between suburban growth and related sprawl and the automobile:

  • the automobile made it possible to build suburbs, and it was impossible to live in the suburbs without having an automobile.

    • Such as travelling to work, shopping, and visiting friends all required use of a car.

Urban Sprawl

• Urban sprawl is often taken to imply not just residential development but also the supporting commercial landscape, with the strip mall and retail power centre as the leading components.

• Sprawl can lead to the formation of conurbations that are perhaps better understood as city regions.

Inequality and Poverty

The Urban Poor

• Answer to why people are deprived of basic needs, why undernourished or malnourished; can be categorized in following four points:

  1. Some experts say culture of poverty typically leads to a cycle of poverty. This never ending culture of poverty is never ending, and slum living becomes the usual way of life and limits the prospects for social and spatial integration with the larger urban area.

     • This statement can be interpreted as blaming the poor for being poor.

  2. An extension of this logic focuses on personal characteristics that limit the ability of individuals to cope and care for themselves, characteristics such as physical or mental illness, deviant behavior, personal disaffection with prevailing lifestyles, and lack of education and employment skills.

  3. Some argue for an emphasis on structural class conflicts and claimed that the capitalist system necessarily concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a few and requires a majority population who are relatively dispossessed both materially and socially.

  4. Some emphasize the roles played by those who have the power to control access to urban resources, such as real-estate agents and mortgage companies have hand over poverty.

Poverty and Urban Life

• In many American cities it is possible to identify “welfare neighborhoods”.

• These neighborhoods typically lose health, education and financial and basic retailing services, including inexpensive supermarkets.

• Although members of all social groups are susceptible to poverty, compelling evidence links it with ethnic minority identity, employment status, level of education, health, age, and gender issues.

• Poverty and health problems also go hand in hand as inadequate housing or homelessness increases the risk of hypothermia during cold periods and of tuberculosis, bronchitis, and skin infections.

• In countries that lack an effective, free health-care system, these illnesses may go untreated.

  • Substance abuse, as one avenue out of despair, is also a major health problem in poor areas of the city.

• Poverty is also closely related to criminal activity, with poor people regularly overrepresented as both perpetrators and victims.

• It is important to recognize that criminal activity is related to inequality and social exclusion; further, poor groups within society, especially visible minorities and others readily identifiable by authorities, are often targeted for harassment and arrest.

Homelessness

• Categorized in following categories:

  • Rooflessness

  • Houselessness

  • Living in insecure housing

  • Living in adequate accommodation

Cities as Centers of Production and Consumption

Manufacturing

• By the early twentieth century, manufacturing regions came into being and many of their cities concentrated on just one or a few related manufacturing activities.

  • Inside these cities, it was usual for many industrial activities to be located adjacent to the central business district, near waterways, and/or along railway lines.

• Time to time, manufacturing sites moved to less developed cities.

  • This movement from the city center towards the urban periphery is part of larger economic restructuring processes and is associated with processes that have reduced the friction of distance, such as innovations in transportation and logistics.

• To some degree, manufacturing activities in the inner city have been replaced by various service activities.

Retailing and Consumer Services

• Retailing is a vital component of national and urban economies, a significant user of land, a key factor in the image that residents have of their cities, and a major leisure for urban residents.

• It is considered as a consumer service, as are entertainment and recreation.

• Retail areas, often called power retail developments, including many new retailers. Such centers are controversial in many areas because they may compete with small rural retailers, pave over prime arable land, replace attractive green space, bring significant increases in traffic, and require large parking areas.

Transportation and Communication

Accessibility and Mobility

• Accessibility and mobility help illustrate the valuable role of urban transportation.

• Mobility has increased with technological improvements in transportation and with rising incomes, which has meant that physical distance has become less of a constraining factor.

  • Mobility is closely related to economic circumstances, with low-income earners more dependent on public transit systems and generally less able to move from place to place than high-income earners.

Urban Transportation and Land Use

• Transportation is a major user of urban land and it affects and responds to changes in land use.

• Accessibility is one of the factor considered when businesses and other land users make location decisions that affect the pattern of urban land use.

  • Along with the transportation system, this pattern affects the activity structures of people and businesses contributing to the city’s overall travel pattern.

• Land values close to the highway are higher than those farther away because highways enhance accessibility.

Planning the City

• Cities are planned as part of larger urban policies designed to manage them, for example, to ensure the provision of essential services such as water supply, policing, and transportation networks.

• Cities are planned with constraints, such as zoning regulations that dictate the locations of various land uses.

  • Such regulations are one component of a larger urban planning exercise intended to influence the location of land uses inside the city and the spatial spread and temporal growth of the city.

• Urban planning provides the broad outlines, or the template of the city that is moulded into a particular and ever-changing urban landscape by the actions of those who work, live, and interact within the city.

Cities of the Less Developed World

• Some of the aspects that make less developed world cities less livable than those in the more developed world include health, housing, employment, food and water and education.

• The colonial heritage of many cities in the less developed world left them ill-prepared to cope with the population explosions that have occurred since about 1950. Many of these cities are experiencing social and environmental strains far more severe than those affecting cities in the more developed world. One common feature in rural to-urban migration has been a tendency to gravitate towards a single well-known, or primate, city.

  • Regardless of location, many of these cities suffer from overcrowding, crime, poverty, disease, limited provision of services, traffic congestion, unemployment, damaged environments, and social conflicts.