Reading the Urban Landscape: Census Data and Field Observation Chapter 10 Reading the Urban Landscape: Census Data and Field Observation Activity 1: Census Tract Data Activity 2: Field Survey

Learning Outcomes After completing the chapter, you will be able to: Use electronic data from the 2000 Census of Population and Housing. See a small geographic area within the larger urban context. Structure and sharpen field observation skills.

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Definitions of Key Terms Central Business District: The downtown or nucleus of the urban area. It has the peak value intersection, the densest land use, the tallest buildings, and traditionally was the urban area=s major concentration of retail, office, and cultural activity. Census Tract: An areal unit defined and used by the Bureau of the Census for presentation of data. Census tracts incorporate roughly 4,000 people, but considerable variation occurs. Concentric Ring Model: A model that explains urban land use in a pattern of concentric rings around the city center. Edge Cities: Suburban nodes of employment and economic activity featuring high-rise office space, corporate headquarters, shopping, entertainment, and hotels. Their physical layout is designed for automobile, not pedestrian, travel.

Gentrification: The upgrading of inner-city neighborhoods and their resettlement by upwardly mobile professionals. Invasion and Succession: When new immigrants to a city move into older housing near the city center and push earlier groups outward. Modernism: As a worldview or philosophy, it is the belief in the preeminence of scientific rationality and the inevitability of human progress. As an architectural and urban planning movement, it emphasized function over form and universal models. Multiple Nuclei Model: A model that explains urban land use as organized around several separate nuclei. Postmodernism: As a worldview or philosophy, it rejects the notion that there are any universal models for how the world functions and what is best, and denies that any perspective, style, or subgroup has a monopoly on truth or beauty. As an architectural and urban planning movement, it emphasizes context, aesthetics, and mixing of land uses.

Sector Model: A model that explains urban land use in pie-shaped sectors radiating outward from the city center. Slums: Older, run-down inner-city neighborhoods populated by poor and disadvantaged populations. Suburbanization: The process whereby growth in population and economic activity has been most intense at the fringes of urbanized areas. Urban Realm: Suburban regions functionally tied to a mixed-use “suburban downtown” with relative independence from the CBD. Urban Underclass: The disadvantaged population of inner-city slums that are persistently poor, plagued by a variety of social ills, and concentrated in neighborhoods where a majority of their neighbors are also persistently poor.