City
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Fex urbis lex orbis"--Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo Here's a little thing that's gonna please ya --"Bangkok" (1978) by Alex Chilton |
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An urban area is an area with an increased density of human-created structures in comparison to the areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets.
Urban areas are created and further developed by the process of urbanization. Measuring the extent of an urban area helps in analyzing population density and urban sprawl, and in determining urban and rural populations (Cubillas 2007).
Unlike an urban area, a metropolitan area includes not only the urban area, but also satellite cities plus intervening rural land that is socio-economically connected to the urban core city, typically by employment ties through commuting, with the urban core city being the primary labor market. In fact, urbanized areas agglomerate and grow as the core population/economic activity center within a larger metropolitan area or envelope.
Metropolitan areas tend to be defined using counties or county sized political units as building blocks. Counties tend to be stable political boundaries; economists prefer to work with economic and social statistics based on metropolitan areas. Urbanized areas are a more relevant statistic for determining per capita land usage and densities (Dumlao & Felizmenio 1976).
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Towns
A town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size definition for what constitutes a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world.
See also
- Commuter town
- Company town
- Developed environments
- Location (geography)
- Megalopolis (city type)
- Town charter
- Town Hall
- Town limits
- Town privileges
- Town square
Birth of cities
A city is an urban settlement with a particularly important status which differentiates it from a town.
For Paul Virilio, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was driven not primarily by the politics of wealth and production techniques but by the mechanics of war. Virilio argues that the traditional feudal fortified city disappeared because of the increasing sophistication of weapons and possibilities for warfare. For Virilio, the concept of siege warfare became rather a war of movement. In Speed and Politics, he argues that 'history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems'.
See also
See also
- Developed environments
- Urban climatology
- Urban culture
- Urban decay
- Urban exploration
- Urban planning
- Urban renewal
- Urbanization
- Urban vitality