Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Changing Field of Urban Geography

Since it has taken more than five thousand years to arrive at even a partial understanding of the city’s nature and drama, it may require an even longer period to exhaust the city’s still unrealized potentialities.

—Lewis Mumford, 1938

The purpose of this chapter is, first, to introduce you to the field of urban geography within its historical and contemporary context. We begin by looking at the array of fields and disciplines that are interested in cities, noting how urban geography both overlaps with and is distinct from these fields. We will briefly describe some of the ways that urban geographers have studied the city. We then explore some basic but really important questions that confront anyone interested in the city: (1) how to define the city, especially in relation to other kinds of presumably nonurban places, and (2) how to define the spatial extent of the city and how to think about boundaries. At the end of the chapter we introduce you to the contents and approach of this book, to capture the excitement and dynamics of modern urban geography, a field of growing educational importance as more and more people live in cities, both in the industrial and nonindustrial countries of the world.

Why We Study Cities

Cities are incredibly exciting places and are home to an ever‐increasing share of humanity. Although it has been reported dozens of times, the mid‐2000s marked the first time that more than 50 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By the mid‐2020s, more than 4.6 billion out of roughly 8 billion people on the planet lived in cities, and more than 1 out of every 5 humans lived in cities larger than 1 million in population. The trend only magnifies when projected into the future – the United Nations predicts that by 2050 about two‐thirds of the planet’s 9 billion residents will call cities home.

The relatively recent transition into a majority urban world is all the starker when we recall that just over 120 years ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, only 16 percent of the earth’s population lived in cities. One hundred years before that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, only 7 percent lived in cities. Figure 1.1 demonstrates how rapidly the planet has urbanized over the last several centuries.

Figure 1.1 Global urbanization, 1500–2050.

Source: Authors. Data from OurWorldInData.org.

The urban population percentages are of course much greater in the wealthy capitalist economies of the world, such as the United States and Canada, the countries of Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and the rapidly emerging economies of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. In the United States and Canada, over 80 percent of the population is classified as urban and virtually everyone is dependent on urban connections in everyday life. The world has become urban, and the wealthy capitalist countries – themselves strongly linked – are almost totally locked into the urban way of life. Even rural areas in North America are utterly dependent on large urban centers for their life sources, such as information, economic viability, social ties, entertainment and leisure activities, political expressions and attitudes, cultural attributes, and popular cultural manifestations of behavior. Prominent scholars Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2012) argue that we adopt the concept of “planetary urbanization.” We are all part of the city, whether we physically live there or not.

In 2020, over 82 percent of Americans lived in a metropolitan area (2020 metropolitan population = 289,280,117). Metros are an extended form of urban area that consists of a large politically defined central city plus all the surrounding counties that contain suburbs economically interconnected with the central city. Micropolitan areas, which are small cities not part of larger metro areas, housed an additional 27,469,984 Americans in 2020. The US metropolitan population was concentrated into less than one‐quarter of the US land area. The New York metropolitan area is by far the largest with 20.1 million people compared to second‐ranked Los Angeles with 13.2 million and third‐ranked Chicago with 9.6 million (Table 1.1). Twelve other metropolitan areas have between 4 and 8 million population: Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta, Boston, Phoenix, San Francisco, Riverside, Detroit, and Seattle. Forty‐two US metropolitan areas have between 1 million and 4 million people. The top 50 metropolitan areas each have more than 1 million and are collectively home to more than 55 percent of the total US population (183,842,440 out of 331,449,281).

Overall, metro areas grew by 8.47 percent between 2010 and 2020 (22,586,675 added to 266,693,442) and micro areas grew by only 0.7 percent from 2010 and 2020 (188,967 added to 27,281,017). Among the 20 largest US metropolitan areas (Table 1.1), the fastest growing between 2010 and 2020 are Houston (20.2%), Dallas‐Fort Worth (19.9%), Seattle (16.8%), and Denver (16.5%). Phoenix, Atlanta, Tampa, Minneapolis, Miami, and Washington, DC all grew faster than 10 percent. Some metropolitan areas with population more than 1 million grew exceptionally fast. Austin grew by 33.3 percent and Orlando, Raleigh, and Nashville each grew faster than Houston. Note that all these fast‐growth large metropolitan areas are predominantly located in the South and Southwestern United States. Of the 20 largest metropolitan areas, none lost population between 2010 and 2020 (Detroit lost 3.5 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010). Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles each grew at a very modest rate (< 4.0%).

Table 1.1 Twenty Largest US Metropolitan Areas in Population, 2020, and Percentage Change, 2010–2020

Source: US Bureau of the Census, 2020; compiled by authors.

The importance of cities extends well beyond the demographic fact that most people live in and depend on them. Noted urbanist Lewis Mumford wrote almost 90 years ago:

The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here in the city the goods of civilization are multiplied and manifolded; Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilizations are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and self‐conscious society.

(1938, p. 3)

What was true as Mumford looked back at the city in history is also true today. Cities, great and mundane, are sites of power and importance in almost every realm of life, including politics, economics, law, education and culture. Richard...