Patterns of human settlement and urban form

Learning objectives

• Compare the concentric zone, sector, and multiple nuclei models of urban structure.
• Explain how land values sort uses by location (von Thünen, bid-rent) and how central place theory explains threshold, range, and hierarchy.
• Describe how neighborhoods change through filtering, succession, and gentrification, and how households sort among local governments.
• Describe the forces behind American suburbanization and the rise of edge cities.
• Explain how redlining, restrictive covenants, and exclusionary practices produced segregated settlement patterns, and the legal turning points that followed.
• Apply Kevin Lynch's five elements of the city image, and explain why natural, social, and economic systems must be analyzed together.

Key concepts

Classic models of urban structure

Early twentieth-century sociologists and economists tried to explain where different activities and people locate within a city. The models are simplified, but the exam expects you to recognize them.

The multiple nuclei model fits modern metropolitan regions best, with their many job and retail centers.

7 more sections follow in the full lesson.

Key terms

• Concentric zone model: Burgess's model of rings around the central business district.
• Sector model: Hoyt's model of wedges extending outward along transportation corridors.
• Multiple nuclei model: Harris and Ullman's model of several specialized centers within a city.
• Central place theory: Christaller's explanation of settlement size and spacing by the goods and services they provide.
• Threshold: The minimum market population needed to support a good or service.
• Range: The maximum distance consumers will travel for a good or service.
• Edge city: A suburban concentration of office and retail space, often at highway interchanges.
• Spatial mismatch: The distance between where low-income workers live and where suitable jobs are located.
• Redlining: The practice of denying or restricting credit in neighborhoods graded as high-risk, strongly associated with race.
• Restrictive covenant: A private deed restriction on the use or sale of property; racial covenants were held unenforceable in 1948.
• Exclusionary zoning: Zoning rules that effectively keep lower-income households out of a community.
• Imageability: Lynch's term for how easily a city forms a clear mental image.
• Bid-rent theory: The model in which land users bid for locations by the value of access, so land values fall with distance from the center.
• Rank-size rule: The pattern in which a country's nth-largest city is about 1/n the size of the largest.
• Primate city: A city far larger than any other in its country.
• Exurb: Low-density development beyond the suburbs, tied to the metro area by commuting.
• Megaregion: A network of metropolitan areas linked by economies, infrastructure, and commuting.
• Filtering: The passing of aging housing to lower-income households.
• Gentrification: Higher-income residents and investment moving into a lower-income area, often displacing existing residents.
• Tiebout sorting: Households choosing among local governments by their mix of taxes and services.