Geography 8: Introduction to Urban Studies and the Urban World Week 1: What is Urban?

Keywords City Urban Urbanized areas Suburbs Metropolis, metropolitan area MSA CSA Urbanized place Urbanized country Conurbation Megalopolis

What is urban? Sometimes it’s very clear…

What is not urban? Also sometimes very clear…

Geographic ambiguity to what is urban Much exists in the continuum between the urban and the rural Example: Los Angeles—how do we define the geography of this urban place? Los Angeles the city Los Angeles the metro area Los Angeles the county the “southland”

What are cities? No internationally agreed upon definition But some shared characteristics: Geographic agglomerations of people Functional complexity (unlike rural areas) Centers of power—business, government, cultural Dynamic, complex land-use patterns Linked (via trade, transportation…) Full of contradictions

No international standard of how many people make a “city”—an urban place US Census Bureau says 2500 or more, density of at least 1000/sq mile Now CB uses the term “urbanized” (urban area) of 50,000+ people All Americans live in 1 of 3 types of Census-defined places today: Rural (21%), less than 2500 Urban clusters (11%), 10,000 – 50,000 Urbanized areas (68%), 50,000+

The Problem of the Suburbs Should they be included in city numbers? Should Pasadena, sitting next to Los Angeles, be included as part of the city of LA? Scholars and urban planners generally consider suburbs and cities as functioning as a whole This is the idea behind a metropolis or metropolitan area, Greek for “Mother City” The central city is defined by legal boundaries, the suburbs are communities surrounding it.

Census Bureau defines (core cities and their suburbs as MSAs, Metropolitan Statistical Areas. A collection of counties At least 50,000 people bound by daily commute patterns Some of the counties included may have rural areas (think of some parts of the San Gabriel Mountains which are in LA County). Almost all of the country’s population falls into an MSA—80% live in a metropolitan county.

80% of Americans live in an MSA. Green areas are counties that are considered metropolitan, non-metropolitan counties are white. Entire counties are included (even though some parts of these counties may have rural areas), and because the cut-off is 50,000 so a large portion of the country falls into an MSA.

MSAs include rural areas as well as urban 80% of the US population live in an MSA *71% in urban places *9% in rural areas 20% live in non-metropolitan counties *8% urban, 12% rural Combined LA Metro *5 counties Combined SF Metro *10 counties

Combined Statistical Areas MSAs that are neighbors and function like one giant metropolis Los Angeles CSA is 2nd largest in US, 18 mill (includes 5 counties). San Francisco CSA is 6th (includes 10 counties), 7.5mill New York is largest, 22 mill Chicago 3rd, Baltimore-Washington 4th, Boston 5th.

Megalopolis & Conurbation Jean Gottman, French geographer noticed that many of the CSAs and MSAs blur together, overlap New Jersey—difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, may even find households split. An interwoven geography of metropolitan sprawl The Boston-to-Washington corridor (Bos-Wash)

Another view of the Bos-Wash conurbation. Parallels I-95 Continuous human settlement from Boston to New York, to Philadelphia to Baltimore-Washington D.C.

Coastal CA conurbation. Not as continuous as I-95 Sprawling areas of urban and suburban population densities Largest cluster along our Southern CA coast, with a second cluster around the SF Bay Area, stretching inland to Sacrament

Tokaido Corridor Along the Pacific coast of Japan’s central Honshu Island From Tokyo Bay to the northeast Osaka-Kobe region in the southwest.

New conurbations developing in the EU Blue Banana—British core around London and So. England across the Channel to the low countries of Netherlands, Belgium, Nor. France, western Germany’s industrial Rhineland, across the Swiss Alps and Nor. Italy to the Mediterranean

Cities and change Change is fundamental to urban life But, at the same time, cities are also enduring Consider London, or even Los Angeles Urban form and function may change, but never (almost never) against a blank slate “The only consistent thing about cities is that they are always changing” Tim Hall “The mortality of persons contrasts sharply with the immortality of cities” James Vance