The increasing migration of people to a urban area This leads to the growth in population and area coverage of an urban area It is caused both by migration from rural areas and by the natural increase of population It has knock on effects on rural areas, which become denuded of population
Expansion of cities into rural regions because of population growth In most cases, population growth is primarily due to the movement of rural based people to urban areas This is especially true in Less Developed Countries
The conversion of agricultural, forested, or other undeveloped areas to urban land covers such as residential, commercial/industrial, or mixed urban Note the urbanization occurring around Dayton and Cincinnati in the change image Change image (156K jpg)
There are two related meanings When applied to a country, urbanization refers to growth in the proportion of the population living in urban regions When applied to a geographic area, urbanization refers to growth in the developed portion of the area The urbanization of a country is usually associated with the urbanization of areas around urban regions
The process by which a society becomes more urban Urban area The entire built-up, non-rural area and its population (de Blij & Muller, 1996) Utopianism An analytical approach to the understanding of the impact of telecommunications on urban places Utopianism is often linked with futurism It is the search for radically better and new forms of social life - has attacked the negative aspects of industrial cities - pollution, overcrowding, moral 'degradation', social disintegration - since they first emerged (Gold, 1990) Technological promises have long had a key place in many urban utopias (Gold, 1985; Lyon, 1988) In its most recent guises, treatment of telecommunications as a solution to these perceived problems has been a key theme in utopian thought (Graham & Marvin, 1996)