Urbanization Unit Review
Terms to know:
1.
Bid-Rent Theory: geographical economic theory that refers to how the price and demand on real estate changes as the distance towards the Central Business District (CBD) increases.
2.
Central Business District: The area of a city where retail and office activities are clustered
3.
Central Place Theory, Range, Threshold
Central Place Theory: A theory that explains the distribution of services based on the fact that settlements serve as centers of market areas for services
Range: The maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service
Threshold: The minimum number of people needed to support a service
4.
City models: concentric model, multiple nuclei model, Hoyt sector model, Latin American model

5.
Edge Cities: A large node of office and retail activities on the edge of an urban area (i.e.
Tysons Corner)
6.
Gentrification: A process of converting an urban neighborhood from predominantly lowincome, renter-occupied area to a predominately middle-class, owner-occupied area
7.
Gravity model:
A model that holds that the potential use of a services at a particular location is directly related to the number of people in a location and inversely related to the distance people must travel to reach the service.
8.
Megacities:
A city with a population of greater than 10 million
9.
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 as well.
10.
Urban sprawl/suburbanization
Urban sprawl:
The process of urban areas expanding outwards, usually in the form of suburbs, and developing over fertile agricultural land.
Suburbanization : Movement of upper and middle-class people from urban core areas to the surrounding outskirts to escape pollution as well as deteriorating social conditions (perceived and actual). In North America, the process began in the early nineteenth century and became a mass phenomenon by the second half of the twentieth century.
11.
Counterurbanization: net migration from urban to rural areas in mdcs.
12.
Urbanization in LDCs and MDCs (trends)
13.
White Flight: working and middle-class white people move away from racial-minority suburbs or inner-city neighborhoods to white suburbs and exurbs
14.
World Cities: 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 centers of strategic control of the world economy
15.
Inner city: public housing, redlining, blockbusting, ghettoization
Public Housing: Government assisted housing

Redlining: A process by which banks draw lines on a map and refuse to lend money to purchase or improve property within the boundaries
Blockbusting: a process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their houses at low prices because of fear that black families will soon move into the neighborhood
Ghettoization:
A process occurring in many inner cities in which they become dilapidated centers of poverty, as affluent whites move out to the suburbs and immigrants and people of color vie for scarce jobs and resources.
16.
Rank-size rule:
A pattern of settlements in a country, such that the nth largest settlement is 1/n the population of the largest settlement.
17.
Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs):
Has at least one urbanized area of 50,000 or more and adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration
18.
Megalopolis: an extensive concentration of urbanized settlement formed by a coalescence of several metropolitan areas. The term is commonly applied to the urbanized northeastern seaboard of the U.S. extending from Boston, MA to Washington, D.C.
19.
Squatter settlements: An area within a city in a less developed country in which people illegally establish residences on land they do not own or rent and erect homemade structures