Urbanization and Urban Geography

The main task of Urban Geography is to make sense of the ways in which towns and Cities have changed and are changing. It is concerned with an understanding of the distinctiveness of individual places and the regularities within and between cities in terms of the spatial relationships between people and their environment.

Some of the most important questions for Urban Geographers:
What attributes make cities and neighborhoods distinctive?
How did these distinctive identities evolve?
Are there significant regularities in the spatial arrangement of towns and cities across a Country or region of the world?
Are there significant regularities in the spatial organization of land use within cities and in the patterning of neighborhood populations by social status, household type, or race?
What are the causes of any regularities that do exist?
How do peoples area of residence effect their behavior?

Approaches to Urban Geography:
Spatial analysis approach: based on the philosophy and methodology of positivism that had been developed in the natural sciences.
Behavioral approach: focuses on the study of individual people's activities and decision making in Urban Environments.
Humanistic approach: Used methods such as ethnography and participant observation that attempted to answer questions that capture people's subjective experiences.
Structuralist approach: Cast at the scale of macroeconomic, macrosocial, and macropolitical changes.
Feminist approach: deals with inequalities between men and women and the way in which unequal gender relations are reflected in the spatial structure of cities.