IB Geography: Urban Environments Terms
Shanty/slum Housing
'Homemade' housing using scavenged materials such as corrugated iron, cloth and plastic.
Eco-city:
A city designed to have minimal environmental impact
Smart city:
A city that is performing well in six categories: namely economy, environment, people, living conditions, governance and mobility
Push Factors
A factor that causes people to leave their homelands and migrate to another region.
Pull Factors
A factor that draws or attracts people to another location.
Counterurbanization
A process involving the movement of population away from inner urban areas to a new town, estate, or just beyond the city limits.
Conurbation
An aggregation or continuous network of urban communities.
Resilient city:
Economically productive, socially inclusive and environmentally friendly
Rural-Urban Migration
Permanent movement from suburbs and rural area to the urban city area.
urban ecological Footprint
The amount of biologically productive land and water needed to support an urban population.
CBD:
The central business district is the commercial and economic core of a city
Urban Renewal
The clearing and/or rebuilding and redevelopment of urban slums and/or other run down areas of a city (tends to happen via government planning with developers).
Reurbanization
The development of activities to increase residential population densities within the existing built up area of a city.
Natural Changes
The difference between birth rate and death rate. It tells you by how many the population will be growing per thousand of population per year.
Inward (centripetal) Movement
The movement of people into the urban environment of a city. (Migration into towns and cities)
Outward (centrifugal) Movement
The movement of people out of a city into the rural or suburban environments.
Suburbanization
The outward growth of towns and cities to engulf surrounding villages and rural areas.
Urbanization
The process by which an increasing percentage of a country's population comes to live in towns and cities.
Gentrification
The rehabilitation of deteriorated, often abandoned, housing of low-income inner-city residents. (converting an urban neighborhood from a predominantly low-income renter-occupied area to a predominantly middle-class owner-occupied area, tends to happen via market forces)
Urban Sprawl
The unplanned and uncontrolled physical expansion of an urban area into the surrounding countryside.
megacity
a city with 10 million people or more
Contested land use
areas of land use where different stakeholders have different ideas of how the land should be used.
millionaire city
cities with more than 1 million people
hierarchy of settlements
is a concept used the define and classify settlements according to size and type of goods provided.
Deindustrialization:
process of industries leaving a city.
Urban deprivation
refers to variety of factors associated with a poor quality of life in a city.
Informal housing:
slum or shanty houses with no formal utilities or land deeds.
Informal economy:
small scale, locally owned and labor intensive
Urban heat island effect:
that the urban area is warmer than the surrounding rural area, especially at dawn during anticyclonic conditions