Urban studies
field within the social sciences
Urban studies is the transdisciplinary study of urban settlements and urban development—comprising the theory portion of the field of urban planning. Topics range from geography, sociology, anthropology, history, urban design and architecture, to public policy and politics, and their interrelations with community development. Urban studies is a major field of study used by practitioners of urban planning, it helps with the understanding of human values, development, and the interactions they have with their physical environment.
History
The study of cities has changed dramatically from the 1800s over time, with new frames of analysis being applied to the development of urban areas. The first college programs were created to observe how cities were developed based on anthropological research of ghetto communities. In the mid-1900s, urban study programs expanded beyond just looking at the current and historical impacts of city design and began studying how those designs impacted the future interactions of people and how to improve city development through architecture, open spaces, the interactions of people, and different types of capital that form a community.
Urban history plays an important role in this field of study because it reveals how cities have developed previously. History plays a large role in determining how cities will change in the future. Such areas change continuously as part of larger processes and create new histories that researchers study on both large-scale and individual levels.
Overall, three different themes have influenced how researchers have and will continue to study urban areas:
Spatial structures: Reflect how the city is physically organized
Processes that support spatial structure: Question how the city's structure operates
Normative Analysis: Construct opinions supported by facts to promote better urban planning methods
Scholars have also researched how cities outside of the United Kingdom and the United States have developed, but only to a limited degree.
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This entry incorporates text from “Urban studies” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.