Urban geography

Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography which concentrates on those parts of the Earth's surface that have a high concentration of buildings and infrastructure. Predominantly towns and cities, these are settlements with a high population density and with the majority of economic activities in the secondary sector and tertiary sectors.

Urban geographers are primarily concerned with the ways in which cities and towns are constructed, governed and experienced. Contrary to neighboring disciplines such as urban anthropology, urban planning and urban sociology, urban geography mostly investigates the impact of urban processes on the earth's surface's social and physical structures. Urban geographical research can be part of both human geography and integrated geography.

There are essentially two approaches to urban geography: the investigation of systems of cities and research on cities as systems. The first approach involves the study of problems relating to the spatial distribution of cities themselves and the complex patterns of movement, flows and linkages that bind them in space. The second approach is on the study of patterns of distribution and interaction within cities, essentially the study of their inner structure.

Cities differ in their economic makeup, their social and demographic characteristics, and the roles they play within the city system. One can trace these differences back to regional variations in the local resources on which growth was based during the early development of the urban pattern and in part to the subsequent shifts in the competitive advantage of regions brought about by changing locational forces affecting regional specialization within the framework of a market economy. The recognition of different city types is critical for the classification of cities in urban geography. For such classification, emphasis given in particular to functional town classification and the basic underlying dimensions of the city system.

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