Borchert's epochs refer to five distinct periods in the history of American urbanization and are also known as Borchert's model of urban evolution. Each epoch is characterized by the impact of a particular transport technology on the creation and differential rates of growth of American cities. This model was conceptualized by University of Minnesota geographer John R. Borchert (about) in 1967. The five epochs identified by Borchert are:
Subsequent researchers (e.g., Phillips and Brunn) have proposed an extension of Borchert's model with new epochs to take into account late 20th-century developments in patterns of metropolitan growth and decline in the United States.
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
Economic geography is the subfield of human geography that studies economic activity and factors affecting it. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics. There are four branches of economic geography.
The history of rail transport began before the beginning of the common era. It can be divided into several discrete periods defined by the principal means of track material and motive power used.
One of the major subfields of urban economics, economies of agglomeration, explains, in broad terms, how urban agglomeration occurs in locations where cost savings can naturally arise. This term is most often discussed in terms of economic firm productivity. However, agglomeration effects also explain some social phenomena, such as large proportions of the population being clustered in cities and major urban centers. Similar to economies of scale, the costs and benefits of agglomerating increase the larger the agglomerated urban cluster becomes. Several prominent examples of where agglomeration has brought together firms of a specific industry are: Silicon Valley and Los Angeles being hubs of technology and entertainment, respectively, in California, United States; and London, United Kingdom, being a hub of finance.
The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of rapid scientific discovery, standardisation, mass production and industrialisation from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. The First Industrial Revolution, which ended in the middle of the 19th century, was punctuated by a slowdown in important inventions before the Second Industrial Revolution in 1870. Though a number of its events can be traced to earlier innovations in manufacturing, such as the establishment of a machine tool industry, the development of methods for manufacturing interchangeable parts, as well as the invention of the Bessemer process and open hearth furnace to produce steel, the Second Industrial Revolution is generally dated between 1870 and 1914.
Urban sprawl is defined as "the spreading of urban developments on undeveloped land near a more or less densely populated city". Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for very dense urban planning. Sometimes the urban areas described as the most "sprawling" are the most densely populated. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. In modern times some suburban areas described as "sprawl" have less detached housing and higher density than the nearby core city. Medieval suburbs suffered from the loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Modern disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The revenue for building and maintaining urban infrastructure in these areas are gained mostly through property and sales taxes. As most jobs in the US are now located in suburbs generating much of the revenue, although a lack of growth will require higher tax rates.
Greater Buenos Aires, also known as the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, refers to the urban agglomeration comprising the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and the adjacent 24 partidos (districts) in the Province of Buenos Aires. Thus, it does not constitute a single administrative unit. The conurbation spreads south, west and north of Buenos Aires city. To the east, the River Plate serves as a natural boundary.
The urbanization of most of Africa is moving fast forward, especially south of the Sahara. It is estimated that in 1900, about 89% of inhabitants lived from the primary occupations of farming, hunting & gathering, cattle nomadism, and fishing meaning that 11% or less were urban. At the start of the independence period in 1957, 14.7% of Africa's inhabitants were urban, in 2000 had it risen to 37.2% and it is expected to rise to 49.3% in 2015, in effect 3.76% to 3.35% per year. In sub-Saharan Africa in 1960 "only one city, Johannesburg, had a population of one million;...in 2009, there were fifty-two cities with such large populations." The Nigerian city of Lagos that in 1963 had 665,000 inhabitants and 8.7 million in 2000 is expected to become the world's 11th biggest city by 2015 with 16 million inhabitants.
Suburbanization (AE), or suburbanisation (BE), is a population shift from historic core cities or rural areas into suburbs, resulting in the formation of (sub)urban sprawl. As a consequence of the movement of households and businesses away from city centers, low-density, peripheral urban areas grow.
A primate city is a city that is the largest in its country, province, state, or region, and disproportionately larger than any others in the urban hierarchy. A primate city distribution is a rank-size distribution that has one very large city with many much smaller cities and towns and no intermediate-sized urban centers, creating a statistical king effect.
The overlapping generations (OLG) model is one of the dominating frameworks of analysis in the study of macroeconomic dynamics and economic growth. In contrast to the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans neoclassical growth model in which individuals are infinitely-lived, in the OLG model individuals live a finite length of time, long enough to overlap with at least one period of another agent's life.
The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0. The 1970s to 1980s productivity paradox inspired many research efforts at explaining the slowdown, only for the paradox to disappear with renewed productivity growth in the developed countries in the 1990s. However, issues raised by those research efforts remain important in the study of productivity growth in general, and became important again when productivity growth slowed around the world again from the 2000s to the present day.
Robert Henry Thurston was an American engineer, and the first Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology.
The organizational life cycle is the life cycle of an organization from its creation to its termination. It also refers to the expected sequence of advancements experienced by an organization, as opposed to a randomized occurrence of events. The relevance of a biological life cycle relating to the growth of an organization, was discovered by organizational researchers many years ago. This was apparent as organizations had a distinct conception, periods of expansion and eventually, termination.
An urban stream is a formerly natural waterway that flows through a heavily populated area. Often times, urban streams are low-lying points in the landscape that characterize catchment urbanization. Urban streams are often polluted by urban runoff and combined sewer outflows. Water scarcity makes flow management in the rehabilitation of urban streams problematic.
A secondary city is an urban hub that fills specific regional and local needs related to governance, economics, finance, education, trade, transportation. A secondary city is defined by population, area, function, and economic status, but also by their relationship to neighboring and distant cities and their socio-economic status. A secondary city may emerge from a cluster of smaller cities in a metropolitan region or may be the capital city of a province, state, or second-tier administrative unit within a country. Secondary cities are the fastest growing urban areas in lower and middle income countries, experiencing unplanned growth and development. By 2030, there will be twice as many medium size cities as there were in 1990, outnumbering the total number of megacities. According to the World Bank, secondary cities make up almost 40% of the world cities population. Many secondary cities in the Global South are expected to undergo massive expansions in the next few decades comparable to city growth in Europe and North America over the past two centuries. These cities are unique environments that generally have limited data and information on infrastructure, land tenure, and planning.
Innovation districts are urban geographies of innovation where R&D strong institutions, companies, and other private actors develop integrated strategies and solutions to develop thriving innovation ecosystems–areas that attract entrepreneurs, startups, and business incubators. Unlike science parks, innovation districts are physically compact, leverage density and high levels of accessibility, and provide a “mash up” of activities including housing, office, and neighborhood-serving amenities. Districts signify the collapse back of innovation into cities and is increasingly used as a way to revitalize the economies of cities and their broader regions. As of 2019, there are more than 100 districts worldwide.
Vukan R. Vuchic is a Serbian-American public transport expert, a professor of the University of Pennsylvania, and a former consultant to the United States Department of Transportation on the planning, design and operation of transport systems. In 1994, he was elected a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
American urban history is the study of cities of the United States. Local historians have always written about their own cities. Starting in the 1920s, and led by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. at Harvard, professional historians began comparative analysis of what cities have in common, and started using theoretical models and scholarly biographies of specific cities. The United States has also had a long history of hostility to the city, as characterized for example by Thomas Jefferson's agrarianism and the Populist movement of the 1890s. Mary Sies (2003) argues:
At the start of the twenty-first century, North American urban history is flourishing. Compared to twenty-five years ago, the field has become more interdisciplinary and intellectually invigorating. Scholars are publishing increasingly sophisticated efforts to understand how the city as space intersects the urbanization process, as well as studies that recognize the full complexity of experiences for different metropolitan cohorts.
Morphology in architecture is the study of the evolution of form within the built environment. Often used in reference to a particular vernacular language of building, this concept describes changes in the formal syntax of buildings and cities as their relationship to people evolves and changes. Often morphology describes processes, such as in the evolution of a design concept from first conception to production, but can also be understood as the categorical study in the change of buildings and their use from a historical perspective. Similar to genres of music, morphology concertizes 'movements' and arrives at definitions of architectural 'styles' or typologies. Paradoxically morphology can also be understood to be the qualities of a built space which are style-less or irreducible in quality.