urbanism:
the way of life, attitudes, values, and patterns of behavior fostered by urban settings.

Early Cities:
prerequisites for development

• an efficient agricultural system - surplus food supports non-farmers and allows specialization.
• an elaborate social organization - coordinate the collection, storage, and distribution of agricultural surplus.
• population growth pushed people into marginal areas - cities based on administration, trade, religion, or defense.

Early cities were quite small by our standards.

Problems limiting the growth of early cities:

• transportation network to serve internal and external needs.
• water
• sanitation and disease
• defense - location and morphology

Emergence of the modern city:

• industrial city:
  functions to assemble raw materials, and to fabricate, assemble, and distribute manufactured goods.
• colonial cities:
  cities that were deliberately established or developed as administrative or commercial centers by colonial or imperial powers.

Locational patterns and functions of American cities:
 

• Cities locate in rich hinterlands - agricultural regions
• Entrepot/Distribution centers: often located along transportation line or trade route - crossroads
• Break of bulk: goods are transferred from one type of transportation to another
• Cluster: around a specialized resource
• Localization economies: cost savings that accrue to particular industries as a result of clustering together at a specific location.

gateway city:
city that serves as a link between one country or region and others because of its physical situation.

economic base:
set of manufacturing, processing, trading, or services activities that serve markets beyond the city.
These activities bring a net flow of income into the city.

basic functions:
economic activities that provide income from sales to customers beyond city limits.

nonbasic functions:
economic activities that serve a city's own population.

urban system:
an interdependent set of urban settlements within a specified region.

central place:
a settlement in which certain products and services are available to customers.

centrality:
the functional dominance of cities within an urban system.

central place theory:
a theory that seeks to explain the relative size and spacing of towns and cities as a function of people's shopping behavior.

threshold:
the minimum market size required to make the sale of a particular product or service profitable.