By the end of this section, you should be able to:
- Describe the process of urbanization in the United States and the growth of urban populations worldwide
- Analyze the function of suburbs, exurbs, and concentric zones
- Discuss urbanization from various sociological perspectives
Urbanization is the study of the social, political, and economic relationships in cities, and someone specializing in urban sociology studies those relationships. In some ways, cities can be microcosms of universal human behavior, while in others they provide a unique environment that yields its own brand of human behavior. There is no strict dividing line between rural and urban; rather, there is a continuum where one bleeds into the other. However, once a geographically concentrated population has reached approximately 100,000 people, it typically behaves like a city regardless of what its designation might be.
The content of this course has been taken from the free Sociology textbook by Openstax