Latin America City Model

• Theory that the farther away from the center of a city, the worse conditions get economically, politically, and socially.

Multiple Nuclei Model

• A model of the international structure of cities in which social groups arranged around a collection of nodes of activities.

Gentrification

• A process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominately low income, renter occupied area to a predominantly middle class, owner occupied area.

Conurbation

• A group of continuous networks of urban communities.

Edge City

• A large node of office and retail activities on the edge of an urban area.

Density Gradient

• The change in density in an urban area from the center of the area to the outside.

Hinterland

• An area that surrounds an urban center that is dependent on the urban center for goods and services.

Megalopolis

• A very large city, sometimes a region made up of several large cities and their surrounding areas in sufficient proximity to be considered a single urban complex.

Entrepôt

• A port where merchandise can be imported and re-exported with paying import duties; a mart or place where merchandise is deposited

Filtering

• A process of change in the use of a house, from single-family owner-occupancy to abandonment.

Greenbelt

• A ring of land maintained as parks, agriculture, or open space that surrounds a town or city and limits urban sprawl.

Urban Realms Model

• Includes a central business district, central city, new downtown, and suburban downtown.

• Each realm is a separate economic, social, and political entity that is linked together to form a larger metro framework.

Zoning

• Pertaining to the division of an area into zones, as to restrict the number and types of buildings and their uses.

Central Business District (CBD)

• The area of a city where retail and office activities are clustered.

Zone in Transition

• Zone of mixed land uses that surrounds the central business district. These zones are often referred to as such because of the mixture of growth, change, and decline.

World City

• 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.

Peripheral Model

• A model of North American urban areas consisting of an inner city surrounded by large suburban residential and business areas tied together by a beltway or ring road.

Sprawl

• The spreading outwards of a city, and its suburbs to its outskirts to low density and auto dependent development on rural land, high segregation of uses, and various design features that encourage car dependency.

Public Housing Project

• Housing that is built, operated, and owned by a government and that is typically provided at nominal rent to the needy.

Concentric Zone Model

• Model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are spatially arranged in a series of rings.

Underclass

• A segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class.

Redlining

• A practice by banks and mortgage companies of demarcating areas considered to be high risk for housing loans.

Primate City

• The largest settlement in a country, if it has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement.

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; larger settlements are fewer and further apart than smaller settlements, and provide services for a larger number of people who are willing to travel farther.

Urban Renewal

• A program in which cities identify inner-city neighborhoods acquire the properties from private owners, relocate the residents and businesses, clear the site, build new roads and utilities, and turn the land over to private developers.

MSA

• Metropolitan Statistical Area

• In the U.S., a central city of at least 50,000 population, the county within which the city is located, and adjacent counties meeting one of several tests indicating a functional connection to the central city