Study Guide: Terms Only

Urban Geography Study Guide

City= a conglomeration of people/buildings clustered together to serve as a center of politics, culture, and economics.

Urban= the buildup of the central city and the suburban realm- the city and the surrounding environs connected to the city

Facts:

Almost half (50%) of the Earth's population live in urban areas/cites.

A rural area can become urbanized quite quickly in the modern world.

Shenzhen, China is an example of a rural area becoming urbanized very quickly. It only took 25 years for that area to totally change.

The first urban revolution:

Before urbanized people often clustered in agricultural villages

Agricultural villages= a relatively small, egalitarian villages, where most of the population was involved in agriculture

About 10,000 years ago, people began living in agriculture villages.

They soon learned "growing", and now they have a ready supply food. By growing food you can stay in one pace and have the chance to become civilized.

Components to form cities:

1. An agricultural surplus

2. Social stratification (a leadership class)

Hearths of Urbanization:

Mesopotamia (Iraq) - 3500 BC

Nile River Valley (Egypt) - 3200 BC

Indus River Valley (India) - 2200 BC

Haung He An Wei River Valley (China) - 1500 BC

Mesomerica (The Americans) - 200 BC

These are an agricultural surplus and social stratification

Examples:

Indus River Valley:

Harappa and moheno-daro were two of the first cities of the Indus River Valley

They lived an equal lifestyle, keeping houses in equal size, no palaces, no monuments, and this idea was intricately planned.

Haung He An Wei River Valley:

The Chinese purposefully planned their cities too.

They are centered on a vertical structure, and had an inner wall built around the center.

They did not treat everyone here equally, for there were palaces and temples, but only for the leadership class.

Mesomerica:

Mayan Aztec civilizations

Many ancient cities were theocratic centers where rulers were deemed to have divine authority and were god-kings.

Diffusion of Urbanization:

The Greek cities:

By 500 BC, Greeks were highly urbanized.

A network of more than 500 cities and towns made up the Greek empire.

These cities and towns were sitting on mainlands and islands.

Each city had an acropolis and an agora.

The Roman cities:

A system of cities and small towns that were linked together with roads and routes.

The Romans were the first to come up with connecting their cities with roads.

Sites of Roman cities were typically for trade.

A Roman city's form combines the acropolis and agora into one space.

Roman cities had extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Between 1/3 and 2/3's of the population was enslaved.

Second urban revolution:

A large scale of people moved to cities to work in manufacturing, and this was possible because of:

1. The 2nd agricultural involution that improved food production and created a larger surplus

2. Industrialization, which encouraged growth of cities near industrial resources (like a snowball effect)

The second half of the century:

The nature of manufacturing changed and locations changed as well. Many factors have been abandoned, creating "rust-belts" out of once thriving industrial districts

An example is: Steel- most of the things we use are plastic, we no longer use steel as frequently as we use to. Therefor the steel industries are not needed as much as they were back then.

Zones of the city:

1. Central business district (CBD)

2. Central city (the CBD + older housings)

3. Suburb (outlining functionally uniform zone outside of the central city

Edge cities:

Suburban downtown, often located near key freeway intersections that often have:

1. Office complexes

2. Shopping centers

3. Hotels

4. Restaurants

5. Entertainment facilities

6. Sports complexes

Making cities in global core:

Redlining= financial institutions refusing to lend money in certain neighborhoods

Blockbusting= realtors purposefully sell a home at a low price to African Americans and then solicit white residents to sell their homes and low prices, to generate "white flight"