Urban geography facts for kids

New York City, one of the largest urban areas in the world

Urban geography is a part of geography that studies cities and how they grow and change. Urban geographers look at many parts of city life and the buildings and spaces people create. They study how money and natural resources move, how people and animals live, how cities are built, and how governments work. They also look at how cities decay and get renewed, and how people are included or excluded in different areas. Urban geography includes different parts of geography like the physical, social, and economic sides of cities.

Understanding the physical geography of a city helps us know why it was built in a certain place. It also shows how the environment helps or hurts the city's growth. Social geography looks at people's values, cultures, and how diverse groups live together in cities. Economic geography studies how money and jobs move within a city's population. All these parts help us understand how cities are planned and developed around the world.

How Cities Are Built and What They Need

A poster from the EPA about "Green Infrastructure." It shows ways to prevent floods.

The way a city or neighborhood is built shows how buildings and human activities are set up. Cities have "hard infrastructure" like roads and bridges. They also have "soft infrastructure" like health services and schools. City planners and architects help build urban areas.

To fight the bad environmental effects of city growth, many cities use "green infrastructure." This includes things like community gardens, parks, and systems for waste and solar energy. Green infrastructure helps with climate change and reduces flood risks. It can also make the air cleaner and help people feel better mentally.

Money and Resources in Cities

A map showing how much energy people used around the world in 2013.

Cities have grown a lot over the years because of globalization (the world becoming more connected) and urbanization (more people moving to cities). The United Nations thinks that the number of people living in cities will grow from 55% to 68% by the year 2050. More cities mean more money flowing and more use of natural resources. As more people live in cities, they use more energy for homes and transportation. This use is expected to keep growing.

When more people move to cities for work, businesses often follow. This means cities need new buildings like schools, hospitals, and other public places. Building these "soft infrastructures" can help people living in the city. For example, it can help the economy grow by letting people specialize in different jobs. Having many different types of jobs in a city can make its economy stronger.

How People Interact in Cities

"Soft infrastructure" in cities helps people connect and find support. Community places like health centers, schools, and community groups allow people to interact. How humans interact with their city environment can have good and bad effects. People need their environment for important things like clean air, food, and shelter. This need can lead to using too many natural resources as the population grows.

People can also change their environment to meet their goals. For example, they might clear land for farming or to build tall buildings and public housing. Clearing land for cities can harm the environment. It can lead to cutting down too many trees, making the air quality worse, and forcing animals out of their homes.

Social and Political Life in Cities

As cities grew, they needed local governments to keep things organized. People elect politicians to help with environmental and social problems in the city. For example, local and state politics play a big part in how cities deal with climate change and housing issues.

How Urban Geography Impacts Our World

Impact on the Environment

Cities grow through a process called urbanization. This is when rural towns change into bigger urban cities. People often move to cities because of jobs or better opportunities. But cities can also cause problems like harm to the environment. More people can lead to dirtier air and less clean water. Growing cities use more energy, which causes air pollution and can affect people's health. Flash flooding can also happen more often because of city development. Urbanization is important to urban geography because it involves building city systems like sanitation, sewage, and electricity.

Impact on Society

People move from rural areas to cities looking for jobs, education, and better lives. This movement is influenced by "push" and "pull" factors. "Push" factors make people leave rural areas. These include fast population growth in rural areas, low farm production, poverty, and not enough food. "Pull" factors attract people to cities. These include better job chances, better education, good health facilities, and entertainment that offers jobs.

Sometimes, cities change in a way called gentrification. This can lead to bigger differences in income, unfairness between different racial groups, and people being forced to move from their homes. The negative environmental effects of city growth often hurt lower-income and minority areas more than richer communities.

Impact on Climate

The demand for new buildings in crowded cities leads to more air pollution. This is because cities use a lot of energy. More energy use means more heat released, which adds to global warming. Cities are a big reason for climate change because city activities create a lot of greenhouse gases. It's thought that cities cause about 75% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, with transportation and buildings being the biggest sources.

To fight these negative effects, many modern cities are building things that are better for the environment. For example, public transportation like trains and buses helps reduce the number of cars used. Many buildings also use solar energy, which means they rely less on energy sources that cannot be replaced.

Impact on Nature and Animals

City growth has a big impact on biodiversity (the variety of life on Earth). As cities grow, important natural homes for animals and plants are destroyed or broken into small pieces. These small pieces might not be big enough to support many different kinds of living things. In cities, some species can become endangered or disappear from that area.

Humans are the main reason urban areas are expanding. As cities grow from more people and migration, it can lead to cutting down too many trees, losing animal homes, and taking too much fresh water. This can reduce biodiversity and change where species live and how they interact. For example, paving land with concrete can increase water runoff and erosion, and make soil quality worse.

What Urban Geographers Study

Urban geographers mainly study how cities and towns are built, how they are governed, and how people experience them. Along with other fields like urban anthropology (studying city cultures) and urban planning (designing cities), urban geography looks at how city processes affect the social and physical parts of the Earth's surface. Research in urban geography can be part of both human geography (studying people) and physical geography (studying the Earth).

From a geography point of view, cities and towns have two main parts:

1. Location ("systems of cities"): This looks at where cities are located and how they are connected by movement and flows.
2. Urban structure ("cities as systems"): This studies the patterns and interactions within cities, looking at numbers, qualities, and how people behave.

Research Topics

Cities as Centers for Jobs and Services

Cities are different in their economies, their people, and their roles in the city system. These differences come from the local resources they used when they first grew. They also come from changes in how regions compete over time due to shifts in the economy. Recognizing different types of cities is key to classifying them in urban geography. This often focuses on how cities are classified by their main purpose.

Classifying cities helps in two ways. First, it helps find new ideas. For example, knowing different types of cities based on their main purpose can help find patterns in how city functions are spread out. This can lead to new ideas about why these patterns exist. Second, classification helps test ideas that already exist. For instance, to test if cities with many different types of jobs grow faster than cities with only a few types, cities must first be sorted into "diversified" and "specialized."

The simplest way to classify cities is by their main role:

1. Central places: These are mostly service centers for the areas around them.
2. Transportation cities: These cities handle moving goods and people for larger regions.
3. Specialized-function cities: These cities focus on one main activity like mining, manufacturing, or tourism, serving national and international markets.

The types of jobs people have in a city have traditionally been the best way to show what a city specializes in. Different city types are often found by looking at job profiles. A city is said to specialize in an activity if many people work in it.

The link between city systems and manufacturing has become very clear. Cities grew quickly after 1870 partly because of industrial changes. Also, people moving out of city centers in recent years is linked to manufacturing jobs moving away from older industrial areas. Manufacturing is in almost all cities, but its importance is measured by how much money people in a city earn from it. If 25% or more of a city's total earnings come from manufacturing, it's called a manufacturing center.

Many things affect where manufacturing is located. These include the types of materials needed, the costs of production, the market, and transportation costs. Other important things are how businesses group together, government rules, and personal choices. It's hard to know exactly how the market affects manufacturing location, but two things are involved:

• What the product is and how much people want it.
• The costs of moving goods.

Urbanization

Urbanization is the shift of people from rural (countryside) areas to urban (city) areas. It is a major event of our time and a key topic to study.

History of Urban Geography

Urban geography became an important field with the book Social Justice and the City by David Harvey in 1973. Before this, urban geography was more like an academic part of city development and planning. In the early 1800s, urban planning started as a job to help with the bad effects of industrial growth. These effects were described by Friedrich Engels in his 1844 study of working-class life in England.

In a 1924 study, Marcel Aurousseau said that urban geography was so important it couldn't just be a small part of geography. But it really became a special field after World War II. This was when city planning grew, and people started to focus less on physical land in geography studies. Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman were some of the first to promote it.

By the 1930s, urban geography also grew in the Soviet Union. It went hand-in-hand with active urbanization and communist city planning, focusing on cities' economic roles.

Over time, different ways of thinking have been used in urban geography in the West. These include Spatial analysis (studying locations), behavioral analysis (studying human actions), Marxism (studying society and economy), humanism (focusing on human values), social theory, feminism (focusing on gender), and postmodernism (questioning traditional ideas).

Since the 1980s, Geographic information science (GIS) has become widely used. It uses computers to process large amounts of data. This has been very helpful for urban geography.

Important Urban Geographers

See also

In Spanish: Geografía urbana para niños