Urban

Urban comes from the Latin urbs, meaning “city” and most often is used as an adjective, referring to the characteristics of a town or city: urban life or urban sprawl, for example. Various derivatives of urban include urbanism and urbanization. In the United States, in particular, urban has become identified with negative characteristics of contemporary life—urban crime and urban poverty—but it also has been used to market urban lifestyles that stand out from the mainstream.

While the use of urban to describe the modern condition is ubiquitous (a 2003 report from the United Nations noted that half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, with a projected 60 percent of the population expected to live in urban areas by 2030), there is little agreement as to what threshold should be met to qualify a place for being “urban.” The United States defines urban as places with a population of 2,500 or more (50,000 persons are required for an urban area), while the United Kingdom includes places with a population as low as 1,000 if the land use of the village can be identified as “irreversibly” urban in character. In Greenland and Iceland, urban includes localities of just 200 persons. A compendium of definitions used around the world (published in the Yearbook of the United Nations) shows that in many countries urban is defined simply by the official “municipalities,” while in some cases the political definition is merged with a population threshold: In Austria, communes of 5,000 or more persons are considered urban, and in Switzerland the number is 10,000. Clearly the range of definitions makes [Page 837]comparisons of “urbanized areas” and “urban population” problematic, not simply around the world but even within political units. For example, there are important differences in living in an urban locality of 2,500 persons in Mexico, and in the capital, Mexico City, with a population of some 20 million persons.

There is a long-standing distrust of cities and of urban life in the United States. In the novel Redburn, Herman Melville described incredible poverty and the death of a woman and her two children from starvation in the slums of Liverpool. Thomas Jefferson and others looked for an industrial policy that would allow development to take place without the great urban concentrations in Europe. By 1860 railroad commuting was well established in American cities (there were 83 commuter stations within a 15-mile radius of the city of Boston at mid-century). The first planned suburban community in the United States was developed in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, in 1857, and the introduction of the street car in the 1880s produced even more extensive suburban growth. This pattern of development is very different from many European countries, where urban populations tended to remain in the urban center, and urban growth was often limited by earlier city walls. If Americans had a distrust of the city and apprehensions about living in urban areas, for Europeans the city represented a secure and civilized place separated from the untamed and, during periods of warfare, unsafe countryside. Today the European suburb bears much resemblance to the inner city in the United States with high rates of unemployment, poverty, and social exclusion among immigrant and minority youth—in the world of European politics, the third world begins with the suburbs.

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