A megacity is a very large city, typically with a population of more than 10 million people. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in its 2018 "World Urbanization Prospects" report defines megacities as urban agglomerations with over 10 million inhabitants. A University of Bonn report holds that they are "usually defined as metropolitan areas with a total population of 10 million or more people". Elsewhere in other sources, from five to eight million is considered the minimum threshold, along with a population density of at least 2,000 per square kilometre. The terms conurbation, metropolis, and metroplex are also applied to the latter.
A town is a type of a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world.
A metropolitan area or metro is a region consisting of a densely populated urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories which share industries, commercial areas, transport network, infrastructures and housing. A metropolitan area usually comprises multiple principal cities, jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, boroughs, cities, towns, exurbs, suburbs, counties, districts and even states and nations in areas like the eurodistricts. As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions.
A conurbation is a region comprising a number of metropolises, cities, large towns, and other urban areas which, through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to form one continuous urban or industrially developed area. In most cases, a conurbation is a polycentric urbanised area in which transportation has developed to link areas. They create a single urban labour market or travel to work area.
A hamlet is a human settlement that is smaller than a town or village. This is often simply an informal description of a smaller settlement or possibly a subdivision or satellite entity to a larger settlement. Sometimes a hamlet is defined for official or administrative purposes.
Constantinos A. Doxiadis, often cited as C. A. Doxiadis, was a Greek architect and urban planner. During the 1960s, he was the lead architect and planner of Islamabad, which was to serve as the new capital city of Pakistan. He was later known as the father of ekistics, which concerns the multi-aspect science of human settlements.
An urban area is a human settlement with a high population density and an infrastructure of built environment. This is the core of a metropolitan statistical area in the United States, if it contains a population of more than 50,000.
Central place theory is an urban geographical theory that seeks to explain the number, size and range of market services in a commercial system or human settlements in a residential system. It was introduced in 1933 to explain the spatial distribution of cities across the landscape. The theory was first analyzed by German geographer Walter Christaller, who asserted that settlements simply functioned as 'central places' providing economic services to surrounding areas. Christaller explained that a large number of small settlements will be situated relatively close to one another for efficiency, and because people don't want to travel far for everyday needs, like getting bread from a bakery. But people would travel further for more expensive and infrequent purchases or specialized goods and services which would be located in larger settlements that are farther apart.
Ecumenopolis is the hypothetical concept of a planetwide city. It is primarily known as a stock setting in science fiction, but has also received serious consideration in theoretical city planning and futurist concepts.
An urban area or tätort in Sweden has a minimum of 200 inhabitants and may be a city, town or larger village. It is a purely statistical concept, not defined by any municipal or county boundaries. Larger urban areas synonymous with cities or towns for statistical purposes have a minimum of 10,000 inhabitants. The same statistical definition is also used for urban areas in the other Nordic countries.
Ekistics is the science of human settlements including regional, city, community planning and dwelling design. Its major incentive was the emergence of increasingly large and complex conurbations, tending even to a worldwide city. The study involves every kind of human settlement, with particular attention to geography, ecology, human psychology, anthropology, culture, politics, and occasionally aesthetics.
The street hierarchy is an urban planning technique for laying out road networks that exclude automobile through-traffic from developed areas. It is conceived as a hierarchy of roads that embeds the link importance of each road type in the network topology. Street hierarchy restricts or eliminates direct connections between certain types of links, for example residential streets and arterial roads, and allows connections between similar order streets or between street types that are separated by one level in the hierarchy. By contrast, in many regular, traditional grid plans, as laid out, higher order roads are connected by through streets of both lower order levels. An ordering of roads and their classification can include several levels and finer distinctions as, for example, major and minor arterials or collectors.
A megalopolis or a supercity, also called a megaregion, is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on. They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities. The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.
In geography, statistics and archaeology, a settlement, locality or populated place is a community of people living in a particular place. The complexity of a settlement can range from a minuscule number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of cities with surrounding urbanized areas. Settlements include hamlets, villages, towns and cities. A settlement may have known historical properties such as the date or era in which it was first settled, or first settled by particular people. The process of settlement involves human migration.
A metropolis is a large city or conurbation which is a significant economic, political, and cultural area for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections, commerce, and communications.
The megaregions of the United States are eleven regions of the United States that contain two or more roughly adjacent urban metropolitan areas that, through commonality of systems, including transportation, economies, resources, and ecologies, experience blurred boundaries between the urban centers, perceive and act as if they are a continuous urban area.
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