Urbanism is the study of cities - their geographic, economic, political, social and cultural environment, and the imprint of all these forces on the built environment. Urbanism is also the practice of creating human communities for living, work, and play, covering the more human aspects of urban planning. Urbanists define urban areas by their high population density. They maintain that this characteristic makes cities physically and sociologically distinct from rural areas. Look up city, City in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Physical map of the Earth (Medium) (Large 2 MB) Geography is the scientific study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on Earth. ... Economics (deriving from the Greek words οίκω [okos], house, and νέμω [nemo], rules hence household management) is the social science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants. ... Politics is the process by which decisions are made within groups. ... Although the term social is a crucial category in social science and often used in public discourse, its meaning is often vague, suggesting that it is a fuzzy concept. ... The word culture, from the Latin colo, -ere, with its root meaning to cultivate, generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... The phrase built environment refers to the manmade surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging from the large-scale civic surroundings to the personal places. ... Urban planning is concerned with the ordering and design of settlements, from the smallest towns to the worlds largest cities. ... Urban density is a term used in urban planning and urban design to refer to the number of people inhabiting a given urbanized area. ... Sociology (from Latin: socius, companion; and the suffix -ology, the study of, from Greek λόγος, lógos, knowledge) is an academic and applied discipline that studies society and human social interaction. ...

Some scholars ^{[citation needed]} initially rejected the notion that there were any significant differences between the social and political order between the rural or urban, hence there was no point in a specifically 'urban studies'. However, this debate has been largely resolved. It is widely accepted (UN Habitat 2000) that cities do exist in a fundamentally distinct state from rural areas, and that the world population is increasingly living in urbanized areas. The world urban/rural population distribution provides evidence for this, and since 2007, at least 50% of the globe has been urbanized.^[1] The importance of the interaction between the urban and rural is also studied, along with the importance of the hinterland. Sign in a rural area in Dalarna, Sweden Qichun, a rural town in Hubei province, China An artists rendering of an aerial view of the Maryland countryside: Jane Frank (Jane Schenthal Frank, 1918-1986), Aerial Series: Ploughed Fields, Maryland, 1974, acrylic and mixed materials on apertured double canvas, 52... Crowded Shibuya, Tokyo shopping district An urban area is an area with an increased density of human-created structures in comparison to the areas surrounding it. ... Map of countries by population — China and India, the only two countries to have a population greater than one billion, together possess more than a third of the worlds population. ... The meaning of hinterland and its history. ...

In the contemporary world this hinterland is less easily defined due to communications technology, but in pre-industrial, agrarian societies, it would have been much more evident that the city cannot exist without a hinterland to supply it. This, however, assumes that such an agrarian society thought within the same framework as the modern, and in many cases (such as that of the Roman Empire or ancient Greece) this can be seen to be untrue; The Roman and Greek municipium or polis can be seen to be a social, political and economic entity consisting of "urban" centre and hinterland. Industrialisation (or industrialization) or an industrial revolution (in general, with lowercase letters) is a process of social and economic change whereby a human society is transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial state . ... Agrarian has two meanings: It can mean pertaining to Agriculture It can also refer to the ideology of Agrarianism and Agrarian parties. ... For other uses, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ... Ancient Greece is a period in Greek history that lasted for around nine hundred years. ... A municipium was the second highest class of a Roman city, and was inferior in status to the colonia. ... A polis (πόλις, pronunciation pol-is) plural: poleis (πόλεις) is a city, a city-state and also citizenship and body of citizens. ...

Having established that cities are genuinely distinct from rural areas, scholars have studied cities according to several dimensions: the internalist perspectives which looks at spatial and social order within a city, externalist perspectives which views cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows, and the interstitial perspective which attempts to reconcile the two perspectives: by trying to understand how globalizing flows and external forces influence, and are influenced by, the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city. Amin and Graham (1997) argue in The Ordinary City that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change. 2-dimensional renderings (ie. ... The word space has many meanings, including: Physics The definition of space in physics is contentious. ... Social order is a concept used in sociology, history and other social sciences. ... Ash Amin is a professor at Durham University, UK. He graduated from the University of Reading in 1979 with a first-class degree in Italian Studies and then gained a PhD in geography from Reading in 1986. ...

References

Eduardo, Lopez; Rasna Warah (2006-7). Urban and Slum Trends in the 21st Century. UN Chronicle. Retrieved on [[2007-8-21]].

See also

• Landscape urbanism, an urbanism modeled on the disciplines of landscape architecture and ecology.
• New urbanism, a response to contemporary problems such as urban sprawl and traffic congestion.
• Unitary urbanism, a critique of urbanism as a technology of power by the situationists.
• Urban design
• Urban planning
• World Urbanism Day.

Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. ... Central Park, like all parks, is an example of landscape architecture. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... The New urbanism is an American urban design movement that arose in the early 1980s. ... Urban sprawl (also: suburban sprawl) is the spreading out of a city and its suburbs over rural land at the fringe of an urban area. ... Unitary Urbanism, or UU, was the critique of status quo urbanism employed by the Lettrist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between approximately 1953 and 1960. ... The Situationist International (SI), an international political and artistic movement, originated in the Italian village of Cosio dArroscia on 28 July 1957 with the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies: the Lettrist International , the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Urban planning is concerned with the ordering and design of settlements, from the smallest towns to the worlds largest cities. ... The international organization for World Urbanism Day , known as World Town Planning Day in USA, was founded in 1949 by the late Professor Carlos Maria della Paolera of the University of Buenos Aires to advance public and professional interest in planning. ...

External links

• Hollow city MP3 interview with Rebecca Solnit on the evolution of the US city and contemporary threats to it
• Collection of articles on Shack Settlements
• Urbanism and Aisthesis: Rostros y lugares del anonimato | ciudades, pintura metafísica y sobremodernidad by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD

• Kerb 15 - Landscape Urbanism. This issue includes contributions from Charles Waldheim, Mohsen Mostafavi, FOA, Karres en Brands, Kongjian Yu, Kyong Park, Kathryn Gustafson, Stephen Read, Kelly Shannon, Richard Weller, RMIT Press, 2007.

Further reading

• Amin and Graham (1997) "The Ordinary City" in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 22 pp 411-429
• Manuel Castells The Urban Question, Network Society
• Peter Geoffrey Hall Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
• David Harvey (1989)Flexible accumulation through urbanization
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Henri Lefebvre (1970) "The Urban Revolution"
• Kevin Lynch, Image of the City
• Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
• Robert E. Park, The City - Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (1925) and all the publications of the Chicago school
• Saskia Sassen (1997) The global city: London, New York, Tokyo
• Richard Sennett The Uses of Disorder

• Scape Magazine ’Scape is the new international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism.