The Term "Urban"
Urban is an adjective meaning "of, relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city." But what exactly is a city? There are at least four different ways that we could define a city, and each would yield a very different geographic area.
The archaeological definition yields something that looks like a city. It is: 1) an agglomeration of people and activities; 2) relatively large; and 3) based upon non-primary activities. Archaeologists would use these criteria to determine that a newly discovered ruin had once been a city as opposed to a rural village. Air travelers might use the same criteria to decide that what is visible on the earth below is a city.
Cities are also legal entities. In the United States they are "creatures of the state" that have been created and given various powers by a state government. Cities as legal entities are normally smaller than the area that our archaeological definition would yield. The term "underbounded" is often used to describe the situation where the area located within the city limits is smaller than what looks like a city.
Increasingly, the area that functions like a city on a daily basis is no longer a compact agglomeration of people and activities. Instead, a vast, interrelated "daily urban system" sprawls across the landscape and extends for one or two hours of travel time out from the legal entity, the old "central city" left in the center.
Finally, most countries have an official definition for "urban." In the United States the Bureau of the Census defines as urban any settlement with more than 2,500 residents--hardly most people's notion of a city. The minimum size is 30,000 in Japan, 10,000 in Italy, 10,000 in Turkey, 5,000 in India, 1,000 in Australia, and 200 in Sweden.
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