Quiz 13 - Urbanization A-M

Agglomeration - the spatial grouping of people or activities for mutual benefit; a process involving the clustering or concentrating of people or activities.

Barriadas - illegal housing settlements, usually made up of temporary shelters, that surround large cities; often referred to as a squatter settlement.

Bid-Rent Theory - the amount of land different land users are prepared to pay for locations at various distances form the city center. The result is a tendency for a concentric pattern of land uses.

Blockbusting - rapid change in the racial composition of residential blocks in American cities that occurs when real estate agents and others stir up fears of neighborhood decline after encouraging Ethnic minorities (African-American) to move to previously white neighborhoods. In the resulting out migration, real estate agents profit through the turnover of properties.

CBD - the downtown hear of a central city, marked by high land values, a concentration of business and commerce, and the clustering of the tallest buildings; the central nucleus of commercial land use in a city.

Census Tract - small districts used by the U.S. Census Bureau to survey the population.

Centrality - the strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract producers and consumers to its facilities; a city’s “reach” into the surrounding region; the functional dominance of cities within an urban system.

Central City - the urban area that is not suburban; generally, the older or original city that is surrounded by the suburbs.

Central Place Theory - a theory that seeks to explain the relative size and spacing of towns and cities as a function of people’s shopping behavior.

Christaller, Walter - German geographer who in the early 1930s first formulated central-place theory as a series of models designed to explain the spatial distribution of urban centers.  Crucial to his theory is the fact that different goods and services vary both in threshold and in range

City - a multifunctional nucleated settlement with a central business district and both residential and nonresidential land uses.

Cityscapes - an urban landscape.

Colonial city - a city founded by colonialism or an indigenous city whose structure was deeply influenced by Western colonialism.

Commercialization - the transformation of an area of a city into an area attractive to residents and tourists alike in terms of economic activity.

Commuter zone - the outer most zone of the Concentric zone model that represents  people who choose to live in residential suburbia and take a daily commute into the CBD to work.

Concentric zone model - a model describing urban land uses as a series of circular belts or rings around a core central business district, each ring housing a distinct type of land use.

Counterurbanization - the net loss of population from cities to smaller towns and rural areas.

Decentralization - the tendency of people or businesses and industry to locate outside the central city.

Economic base (basic/nonbasic) - the manufacturing and service activities performed by the basic sector of a city’s labor force; functions of a city performed to satisfy demands external to the city itself and, in that performance, earning income to support the urban population.

Basic sector - those products or services of an urban economy that are exported outside the city itself, earning income for the community.

Nonbasic sector - (syn: service sector) those economic activities of an urban unit that supply the resident population with goods and services and that have no “export” implication.

Edge city - distinct sizable nodal concentration of retail and office space of lower than central city densities and situated on the outer fringes of older metropolitan areas; usually localized by or near major highway intersections.

Entrepót - (French for warehouse) a trading center, or simply a ware house, where merchandise can be imported and exported without paying import duties, often at a profit. This profit is possible because of trade conditions, for example, the reluctance of ships to travel the entire length of a long trading route, and selling to the entrepot instead. The entrepot then sells at a higher price to ships traveling the other segment of the route. Today, this use has mostly been supplanted by custom areas.

Custom area - an area designated for storage of commercial goods that have not yet cleared customs. It is surrounded by a customs border. Most international airports and harbors have designated customs area, sometimes covering the whole facility and including extensive storage warehouses.

Ethnic neighborhood - neighborhood, typically situated in larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs.

Favela - the Brazilian equivalent of a shanty town, which are generally found on the edge of the city. They have electricity, but often not formally. They are constructed from a variety of materials, ranging from bricks to garbage. The most infamous ones are located in Rio de Janeiro.

Female-headed household - Which group (ethnic) in the United States is mostly likely to be headed by  a female? Give statistics for your answer.

Festival setting - a multi use redevelopment project that is built around a particular setting, often one with a historical association.

Gateway city - a city that serves as a link between one country or region and others because of its physical situation.

Gender - the social differences between men and women rather than the anatomical differences that are related to sex.

Gentrification - the invasion of older, centrally located working-class neighborhoods by higher-income households seeking the character and convenience of less expensive and well-located residences; a process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominately low-income renter-occupied area to a predominately middle-class owner-occupied area.

Ghetto - during the Middle Ages, a neighborhood in a city set up by law to inhabited only by Jews; now used to denote a section of a city in which members of any minority group live because of social, legal, or economic pressure.

Globalization - actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope.

High-tech corridors - areas along or near major transportation arteries that are devoted to the research, development, and sale of high-technology products. These areas develop because of the networking and synergistic advantages of concentrating high-technology enterprises in close proximity to one another. “Silicon Valley” is a prime example of a high-technology corridor in the United States.

Hinterland - the sphere of economic influence of a town or city.

Hydraulic civilization - a civilization based on large-scale irrigation.

Indigenous culture- a culture group that constitutes that original inhabitants or a territory, distinct form the dominant national culture, which is often derived rom colonial occupation.

In-filling - new building on empty parcels of land within a checkerboard pattern of development.

Informal sector - economic activities that take place beyond official record, not subject to formalized systems of regulation or remuneration.

Infrastructure - (or fixed social capital) the underlying framework of services and amenities needed to facilitate productive activity.

Inner city - the central area of a major city; in the United States the term is often applied to the poorer parts of the city center and is sometimes used as a euphemism with the connotation of being an area, perhaps a ghetto, where people are less educated and wealthy and where there is more crime.

Invasion and succession - process by which new immigrants to a city move to dominate or take over area or neighborhoods occupied by older immigrant groups. For example, in the early twentieth century, Puerto Ricans “invaded” the immigrant Jewish neighborhood of East Harlem an successfully took over the neighborhood or “succeeded” the immigrant Jewish population as the dominant group in the neighborhood.

Megacities - a very large city characterized by both primacy and high centrality within its national economy.

Megalopolis / conurbation - a large, sprawled urban complex with contained open, nonurban land, created through the spread and joining of separate metropolitan areas; When capitalized, the name applied to the continuous functionally urban area of coastal northeastern United States from Maine to Virginia.

Metropolitan area - In the  United States, a large functionally integrated settlement area comprising one or more whole county units and usually containing several urbanized areas: discontinuously built up, it operates as a coherent economic whole.

Multiple nuclei model - the postulate that large cities develop by peripheral spread not from one central business district but from several nodes of growth, each of specialized use. the separately expanding use districts eventually coalesce at their margins.

Multiplier effect - the direct, indirect, and induced consequences of change in an activity; in urban geography, the expected addition of nonbasic workers and dependents to a city’s total employment and population that accompanies new basic sector employment.