Urban structure is the arrangement of land use in

urban area An urban area is a human settlement with a high population density and an infrastructure of built environment. Urban areas originate through urbanization, and researchers categorize them as cities, towns, conurbations or suburbs. In urbani ...

s, in other words, how the land use of a city is set out. Urban planners,

economist An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this ...

s, and

geographer A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" a ...

s have developed several models that explain where different types of people and businesses tend to exist within the urban setting. Urban structure can also refer to urban spatial structure, which concerns the arrangement of

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...

and private space in cities and the degree of connectivity and accessibility.

Zonal model

This model was the first to explain distribution of social groups within urban areas. Based on one single city,

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

, it was created by sociologist Ernest Burgess in 1924. According to this model, a

city A city is a human settlement of a substantial size. The term "city" has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small. Even where the term is limited to larger settlements, there is no universally agree ...

grows outward from a central point in a series of concentric rings. The innermost ring represents the central business district. It is surrounded by a second ring, the zone of transition, which contains industry and poorer-quality housing. The third ring contains housing for the working-class and is called the zone of independent workers' homes. The fourth ring has newer and larger houses usually occupied by the middle-class. This ring is called the zone of better residences. The outermost ring is called the commuter's zone. This zone represents people who choose to live in residential

suburb A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area. They are oftentimes where most of a metropolitan areas jobs are located with some being predominantly residential. They can either be denser or less densely populated ...

s and take a daily commute into the CBD to work.

Sectoral model

A second theory of urban structure was proposed in 1939 by an economist named Homer Hoyt. His model, the sector model, proposed that a city develops in sectors instead of rings. Certain areas of a city are more attractive for various activities, whether by chance or geographic and environmental reasons. As the city grows and these activities flourish and expand outward, they do so in a wedge and become a sector of the city. If a district is set up for high income housing, for example, any new development in that district will expand from the outer edge. To some degree this theory is just a refinement on the concentric model rather than a radical restatement. Both Hoyt and Burgess claimed

supported their model. Burgess claimed that Chicago's central business district was surrounded by a series of rings, broken only by

Lake Michigan Lake Michigan ( ) is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume () and depth () after Lake Superior and the third-largest by surface area (), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron. To the ...

. Hoyt argued that the best housing developed north from the central business district along Lake Michigan, while industry located along major rail lines and roads to the south, southwest, and northwest.

Calgary, Alberta Calgary () is a major city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Alberta. As of 2021, the city proper had a population of 1,306,784 and a Metropolitan area, metropolitan population of 1,481,806 making it the List of ...

almost perfectly fits Hoyt's sector model.

Multiple nuclei model

Geographers Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman developed the multiple nuclei model in 1945.Harris C D and Ullman E L (1945), "The nature of cities" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 242: 7-17 According to this model, a city contains more than one center around which activities revolve. Some activities are attracted to particular nodes while others try to avoid them. For example, a university node may attract well-educated residents, pizzerias, and bookstores, whereas an airport may attract hotels and warehouses. Other businesses may also form clusters, sometimes known locally as Iron Triangles for automobile repair or red light districts for prostitution, or arts districts. Incompatible activities will avoid clustering in the same area, explaining why heavy industry and high-income housing rarely exist in the same neighbourhood.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Urban Structure Urban geography Urban planning Urban design