THE urban geography is the area of geography that is concerned with studying, understanding and carrying out propositions about the urban space and its constitutive processes. This area of knowledge has a strong interdisciplinarity with other fields of knowledge, such as Politics, Economics and, mainly, Architecture and Urbanism.
What is urban space?
Urban space is the organization of human activities juxtaposed in the geographical environment. These compositions are responsible for the formation of cities and the activities inherent to them, as well as their socio-spatial organization system.
It is important to understand that the terms urban and City, despite being commonly used as synonyms, can designate different elements. The urban refers to practices that differ from the rural in the sense of concentrating, preferably, activities related to the secondary (industries) and tertiary (commerce and services), while the rural is composed of unoccupied areas (such as forest reserves) and agrarian areas, which specialize in primary sector practices (agricultural, mining and extractivism). The city, on the other hand, is the materialization of the urban, with population agglomerations and their expressions (sets of houses, buildings, leisure areas, etc).
In the context of the city, there may be non-urban practices, although this is becoming less frequent. An example of non-urban practices in cities is the existence of smallholdings for the production of vegetables that, eventually, are located in areas of high population density. On the other hand, the transfer of an industry to the countryside can designate the manifestation of an urban practice in rural areas.
What's in this section?
The texts in this section aim to address the theme of urban space, cities and the dynamics of urbanization, at levels ranging from local to global. Therefore, issues such as the urban network, the types of cities and intra-urban processes will be addressed, such as slums, urban segregation, the manifestation of social and environmental problems, among others.
By Rodolfo Alves Pena
Graduated in Geography
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/geografia/geografia-urbana.htm