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