Essential Urbanization Terms and Definitions

Essential Urbanization Vocabulary

• Urbanization rate: The ratio of the population that lives in cities with respect to the total population.
• Urban plans: The planning instruments that regulate the growth of cities.
• Urbanization: The progressive concentration of the population in cities, which implies an increase in the urban population.
• City: Any population center that exceeds a certain number of inhabitants.
• Location: The concrete area on which the city sits, i.e., the set of physical facts (geology, relief, soil, etc.) that provide the framework and support of the city.
• Morphology or Urban Landscape: The study of the shape of the city, combining three elements: flat buildings, land uses, and the street plan.
• Urban functions: These are conceived as the economic activities that develop within a city.
• Urban structure: The arrangement within thoroughfare homogeneous areas in terms of land use.
• Adarve: Blind alleys or dead-ends (part of a flat maze).
• General Plan: Serves to set the planning of a municipality; its aims are to establish the distribution of land use for equipment and the location of infrastructure. It regulates the rights and duties of the owners through the classification of different soil types: building land, land that cannot be developed, and urban land.
• Conurbation: Formed when several metropolitan areas grow and come to join.
• Megalopolis: A set of linked conurbations.
• Metropolization: The phenomenon by which the city grows and absorbs the semi-rural areas around it.
• Metropolitan Area: The city and its surrounding area of influence, which depends on the city for jobs and services.
• Metropolis: These differ from central cities because they incorporate more functions and develop a new urban morphology and structure. Their functions include the upper tertiary sector, and morphology changes through the incorporation of new elements such as large avenues and fast roads.
• Rururbanization: This is the same as metropolization.
• CBD (Central Business District): A sector focus and the most prominent area of the city where shops, banks, entertainment venues, and cultural sites are located. In Europe, these often coincide with the ancient city centers.
• City Cottage: A highly urbanized territory where the presence of a major city unites others that keep their own cores but lack legal autonomy as they are integrated into the main city. This is a contact area with rural territory where very different levels of significance are present; its functions are multiple, including residential and commercial uses.
• Urban Net: How cities are ordered within a state or territory.
• Urban System: The disposition of cities on the territory and the relations that these keep with each other and in relation to their surroundings.
• Axis of Economic Development: Formed by cities that grow together, united by lines of communication that are more or less important demographically or economically.
• Volume of Population: A criterion often used to measure the primacy of one city over another; it indicates the attractiveness of a city center and the importance of the functions it plays.