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| Question | Answer |
| City | Conglomeration of people and buildings clustered together to serve as a centre of politics, culture, and economics |
| Urban | The entire built-up, non-rural area and its population, including the most recently constructed suburban appendages. Provides a better picture of the dimensions and population of such an area than the delimited municipality (central city) that forms its heart. |
| Suburban realm | The surrounding environs connected to the city |
| Mega-city | A city having a population of more than 10 million inhabitants. |
| Urban agglomerations | Defined by the United Nations as those populations of 1 mil- lion or more people “within a contiguous territory inhabited at urban levels of residential density.” |
| Agricultural village | A relatively small, egalitarian village, where most of the population was involved in agriculture. Starting over 10,000 years ago, people began to cluster in agricultural villages as they stayed in one place to tend their crops. |
| Agricultural surplus | One of two components, together with social stratification, that enable the formation of cities; agricultural production in excess of that which the producer needs for his or her own sustenance and that of his or her family and which is then sold for consumption by others. |
| Social stratification | One of two components, together with agricultural surplus, that enables the formation of cities; the differentiation of society into classes based on wealth, power, production, and prestige. |
| Leadership class | Group of decision-makers and organizers in early cities who controlled the resources, and often the lives, of others. |
| First Urban Revolution | The innovation of the city, which occurred independently in six separate hearths. |
| Mesopotamia | Region of great cities (e.g., Ur and Babylon) located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; chronologically the first urban hearth, dating to 3500 BCE, which was founded in the Fertile Crescent |
| Urban morphology | The study of the physical form and structure of urban places. |
| Nile River Valley | Chronologically the second urban hearth dating to 3200 BCE. |
| Indus River Valley | Chronologically, the third urban hearth, dating to 2200 BCE. |
| Huang He (Yellow) and Wei (Yangtze) River Valleys | Chronologically, the fourth urban hearth, established around 1500 BCE, at the confluence of the Huang He and Wei rivers in present-day China. |
| Mesoamerica | Chronologically, the fifth urban hearth, dating to 200 BCE |
| Acropolis | Literally “high point of the city.” The upper fortified part of an ancient Greek city, usually devoted to religious purposes |
| Agora | In ancient Greece, public spaces where citizens debated, lectured, judged each other, planned military campaigns, socialized, and traded |
| Site | The internal physical attributes of a place, including its absolute location, spatial character, and physical setting. |
| Forum | Forum The focal point of ancient Roman life combining the functions of the ancient Greek acropolis and agora. |
| Situation | The external locational attributes of a place; its relative location or regional position with reference to other nonlocal places |
| 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. |
| Trade area | Region adjacent to every town and city within which its influence is dominant. |
| Rank-size rule | In a model urban hierarchy, the idea that the population of a city or town will be inversely proportional to its rank in the hierarchy |
| Primate city | A country’s largest city—ranking atop the urban hierarchy—most expressive of the national culture and usually (but not always) the capital city as well. |
| Centrality | The strength of an urban centre in its capacity to at- tract producers and consumers to its facilities; a city’s “reach” into the surrounding region. |
| Functional zonation | The division of a city into different regions or zones (e.g., residential or industrial) for certain purposes or functions (e.g., housing or manufacturing). |
| Zone | Area of a city with a relatively uniform land use (e.g., an industrial zone, or a residential zone). |
| Central Business District (CBD) | The downtown heart of a central city, marked by high land values, a concentration of business and commerce, and the clustering of the tallest buildings. |
| Central city | The urban area that is not suburban; generally, the older or original city that is surrounded by newer suburbs |
| Suburb | A subsidiary urban area surrounding and connected to the central city. Many are exclusively residential; others have their own commercial centres or shopping malls. |
| Suburbanization | The process by which lands that were previously outside the urban environment become urbanized, as people and businesses from the city and other areas move to these spaces. |
| Concentric Zone Model | A structural model of the American central city that suggests the existence of five con- centric land-use rings arranged around a common centre. |
| Edge cities | A term introduced by American journalist Joel Garreau in order to describe the shifting focus of urbanization in the United States away from the central business district (CBD) toward new loci of economic activity at the urban fringe. These cities are characterized by extensive amounts of office and retail space, few residential areas, and modern buildings (less than 30 years old) |
| Griffin-Ford model | Developed by geographers Ernst Grifin and Larry Ford, a model of the Latin American city showing a blend of traditional elements of Latin American culture with the forces of globalization that are reshaping the urban scene. |
| Disamenity sector | The very poorest parts of cities that in extreme cases are not even connected to regular city services and are controlled by gangs or drug lords. |
| Commercialization | The transformation of an area of a city into an area attractive to residents and tourists alike in terms of economic activity. |
| Gentrification | The rehabilitation of deteriorated, often abandoned, housing of low- income inner-city residents. |
| Tear-downs | Homes bought in many North American suburbs with the intent of tearing them down and replacing them with much larger homes, often referred to as “monster homes.” |
| Urban sprawl | Unrestricted growth in many North American urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning |
| New urbanism | Outlined by a group of architects, urban planners, and developers from over 20 countries, an urban design that calls for development, urban revitalization, and suburban reforms that create walkable neighbourhoods with a diversity of housing and jobs. |
| Shantytown | Unplanned slum development on the margins of cities, dominated by crude dwellings and shelters made mostly of scrap wood, iron, and even pieces of cardboard. |
| Zoning laws | Legal restrictions on land use that determine what types of building and economic activities are allowed to take place in certain areas. In North America, areas are most commonly divided into separate zones of residential, retail, or industrial use. |
| Informal economy | Economic activity that is neither taxed nor monitored by a government and is not included in that government’s gross national product (GNP); as opposed to a formal economy. |
| World city | Dominant city in terms of its role in the global political economy. Not the world’s biggest city in terms of population or industrial output, but rather centres of strategic control of the world economy |
| Spaces of consumption | Areas of a city, the main purpose of which is to encourage people to consume goods and services; driven primarily by the global media industry. |
| Transportation geography | The study of the movement of people and goods, the transportation systems designed to facilitate such movement, and the relationship of transportation to other facets of human geography such as economic development, energy, land use, sprawl, environmental degradation, values, and culture |
| Transport networks | The complete system of the routes pertaining to all means of transport available in a particular area. |
| Automobile dependence | A situation in which a city develops on the assumption that automobile use will predominate so that it is given priority in infrastructure and in the form of urban development. |
| Neighbourhood unit | A planning concept developed by Clarence Perry as a means of reconciling the problems of automobile traffic with public safety objectives, most notably those aimed at the safety of children |
| Radburn Idea | A highly influential community planning concept incorporating a hierarchy of roadways, the deliberate segregation of pedestrian and automobile traffic, and the residential “superblock.” |
| Public transit | Various services that provide mobility to the general public in shared vehicles, ranging from shared taxis and shuttle vans, to local and intercity buses and passenger rail. |
| Air pollution | Pollution of the atmosphere |
| Smog | A combination of ground-level ozone, airborne particles, and other air pollutants |
| Water pollution | Pollution caused when discharges of energy or materials degrade water for other users. |
| Noise pollution | A type of pollution in which distracting, irritating, or damaging sounds are freely audible. |
| Social exclusion | The inability of people or households to fully participate in society, engage in activities, or access jobs, services, and facilities. |
| Sustainable transportation | An approach to the provision of transportation infrastructure and services that involves simultaneous consideration of environmental, economic, and social objectives. |
| Containerization | The use of containers to unitize cargo for transportation, supply, and storage. |
| Break-of-bulk point | A location along a transport route where goods must be transferred from one carrier to an- other. In a port, the cargoes of oceangoing ships are unloaded and put on trains, trucks, or perhaps smaller riverboats for inland distribution |
| Intermodal transportation | The transportation of a person or a load from its origin to its destination by a sequence of at least two transportation modes, the transfer from one mode to the next being performed at an intermodal terminal |
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