Key Terms

Key Terms

City: A constellation of people and social, political, and economic institutions and infrastructures within a physical location.

Colonial city: A settlement either mapped onto an existing settlement or created to establish economic and military dominance in a colony.

Deterritorialization: The severing of social, cultural and political ties from a homeland.

Displacement:  The coerced movement of a people from their traditional homeland.

Global sense of place: Every city is globalized or worldly precisely because of its relationship to other places, and the mobile processes that are ongoing in places. Likewise, a global sense of place means that the territoriality, or what makes a place unique, is able to be understood because other places are different.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design): A certification system for green building construction.

New urbanism: Connectivity, sustainability, walkability, traditional design, increased density and mixed-use structures.

Reterritorialization: the rebuilding or reconstruction of a previously deterritorialized place.

Systems -thinking: An approach to understanding cities based on ecological notions of interconnections. This perspective sees cities as a series of interrelated social, economic and ecological processes that are in constant interaction and motion.

Urbanization: Combines various socio-economic, political, technological and environmental processes that affect the way that cities are made up and how people live in cities.

Urban artifacts : Public material structures that have layers of meaning placed on them by people in the city.

Urban decay: Processes defined by stagnating economies due to deindustrialization, depopulation of cities, changing and racialized populations moving into the city, immigration, a growing ideology of home ownership and suburbanization, fears of increased crime, and poverty leading to increased instances of ill health, illicit drug use and decreased property values.