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Urban geography examines the internal structure of cities, their growth processes, and their roles in regional and global networks. Classic models of urban structure include Burgess's concentric zone model (rings expanding outward from the CBD), Hoyt's sector model (wedge-shaped sectors along transportation corridors), and Harris and Ullman's multiple nuclei model (several focal points). These models were developed from North American cities; cities in the Global South often display different structures, with wealthier districts near the center and informal settlements (favelas, shantytowns) at the urban periphery. Processes like suburbanization, gentrification, and urban sprawl continually reshape urban form and social geography.
Apply urban structure models to actual cities using satellite imagery and land use maps, evaluating the fit. Compare a North American city with a Latin American or sub-Saharan African city to identify structural differences. Research a neighborhood undergoing gentrification to identify the economic, demographic, and policy mechanisms at work.
You already know that places are not simply physical locations but are shaped by social and economic processes. Urban geography applies this insight to cities, asking: why are cities arranged the way they are, and how do those arrangements change over time?
The classic urban structure models give you a vocabulary. Burgess observed 1920s Chicago and described expanding rings: a central business district surrounded by a zone of transition (mixed industrial and immigrant residential), then working-class housing, then middle-class suburbs, then commuter zones at the periphery. Hoyt modified this by noting that industrial and high-income residential uses tend to extend in sectors along rail and highway corridors rather than neat rings. Harris and Ullman observed that many cities had grown so large they had multiple distinct centers — a port district, a university campus, a manufacturing zone — each with its own surrounding land uses. These models are not competing truths; they capture different aspects of real urban complexity.
The critical limitation of all three models is that they were derived from North American (mostly US) cities at a particular historical moment. They describe cities shaped by private automobile ownership, federal mortgage subsidies, and deliberate racial segregation through redlining and restrictive covenants. In cities that developed under these conditions, middle-class residents moved outward to suburbs, leaving lower-income residents concentrated near the industrial core. In many Latin American, African, and Asian cities, the pattern is reversed: colonial-era planning created elite enclaves near the center with services, infrastructure, and security, while poor rural migrants arriving in waves of rapid urbanization settled on peripheral land that was cheap precisely because it lacked services. Understanding why requires tracing the colonial and post-colonial political economy, not applying a North American model.
Gentrification and suburbanization are the processes that continuously reshape urban form. Gentrification — the movement of higher-income residents into previously low-income neighborhoods — typically involves renovation of the housing stock, rising rents, displacement of existing residents, and transformation of commercial activity. It is produced by a combination of developer investment, municipal policy (zoning changes, tax incentives), and shifting preferences of higher-income households. Who benefits and who is displaced is a political question, not merely a market outcome.
Finally, resist deficit narratives about informal settlements. The tendency to describe favelas, shantytowns, or informal peri-urban areas purely in terms of what they lack — formal tenure, services, infrastructure — obscures their dense social networks, informal economic vitality, and adaptive responses to exclusion from formal housing markets. Urban geography at its best analyzes these areas as products of specific political economies rather than as aberrations from a Western norm.
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