Urban Systems and Urban Structures

There are many web sites that deal with a range of urban concerns, including poverty, housing, architecture, city and metropolitan area populations, historic preservation, politics, and the like, but relatively few easily identifiable as "urban" by title or agency and even fewer clearly "urban geographic" in orientation. Even without that specific focus, however, many sites deserve your attention and contain data, publications, or resources pertinent to topics covered in this chapter.

A good starting point that represents international interest in urban settlement, particularly in developing regions, is the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat). Its home page at www.unchs.org/ provides entry to a variety of documents and reports, including the 1997 World Habitat Day and the Istanbul Habitat Conference.

Also, be sure to follow the menu choices to the Global Urban Observatory and the Urban Indicators programs. The UN Habitat-sponsored Best Practices Database (www.bestpractices.org), a searchable document that contains "proven solutions to common . . . problems of an urbanizing world." First presented at the United Nations Habitat II City Summit in 1996, this "knowledge base" identifies ways in which shared solutions can address urban issues such as poverty, access to land, clean water, shelter, and transportation. The UN's educational program Cities of Today, Cities of Tomorrow, although designed for grades 5-12, has a useful set of background papers for those of any age interested in world cities, their history, and their current problems; the site gives access as well to a set of brief international "City Profiles": www.un.org/Pubs/CyberSchoolBus/special/habitat.

The State of the Cities reports for recent years are among the documents available for downloading from the home page of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at www.hud.gov/. Much of the site, however, has to do with fair housing laws and other operational concerns of the agency itself and not with academic urban concerns.

State of the Nation's Cities is the subject of a comprehensive database on 77 American cities and suburbs developed by the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. The database brings together nearly 3000 variables from a wide variety of sources, allowing easy comparability of indicators on employment and economic development, demographic measures, housing and land use, income and poverty, and a host of other health, social, and environmental indicators. Enter the Center's home page through www.policy.rutgers.edu/cupr/ and under the "Special" menu item select SONC. An alternative route is through www.policy.rutgers.edu/cupr/sonc.htm.

Urban Geography on the Web is the official home page of the Urban Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. The site contains information on the subdiscipline as well as links to websites of interest. The page is best accessed through the AAG home page at www.aag.org.

Many other professional groups are concerned with urban matters, of course. Some of special interest that you might explore include: the Urban Land Institute at www.uli.org/; the Canadian Urban Institute at www.canurb.com; the National League of Cities (www.nlc.org/); and The Urban Institute (concerned primarily with matters of welfare, housing, social security, and the like) at www.urban.org/.

The Urban Morphology Research Group (UMRG) was founded in 1974 in the School of Geography of the University of Birmingham, England. It specializes in the study of urban form and its home page provides an annotated guide to web resources for those interested in that topic. Annotated links are arranged alphabetically, giving the country of origin for each site; view it at www.bham.ac.uk/geography/umrg/.

One example of changing urban morphology is offered by the Urban Dynamics Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey. Its page on "Analysis of  Land Use Change in Urban Environments" at edcdgs9.cr.usgs.gov/urban. also contains links to its "Urban Dynamics Fact Sheet and to the University of California at Santa Barbara site on "Land Use Change Modeling." In cooperation with UCSB, the Survey maintains a Project Gigaloplis website concerned with the 21st century system of cities. View it at: www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/gig/ncgia.html.

The resource directory of Cyburbia, The Planning and Architecture Internet Resource Center, is a comprehensive website for links (more than 6000) to Internet locations concerned with all aspects of urban planning, historic preservation, housing, public transportation, and the like:

http://www.cyburbia.org. Planning Resources on the Internet by the Environmental Design Library of the University of California, Berkeley, also provides extensive Internet links to urban (and other) planning sites, with a strong emphasis on those of interest to Californians. However, many links have broader interest and application. View it at www.lib.berkeley.edu/ ENVI/cityweb.html.

The Electronic Map Library, provided by the Department of Geography at California State University/ Northridge under the auspices of the California Geographical Survey, gives access to a growing collection of digital atlases including many of major U.S. cities and metropolitan centers. Atlases for each city are divided into four principal topics: population and race, income, poverty, and adult educational attainment. Find the site at maplibrary.csun.edu

Several interesting sites including, at this writing, an instructional piece on rank-size hierarchy, are linked through the "Cities and Urban Geography" segment of About.com at geography.About.com. A more distinctly educational emphasis is inherent in The Virtual Geography Department's "Modules in Urban and Economic Geography." The urban residential land use module by Harrison Campbell is particularly relevant to our chapter: www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/virtdept/contents.html.

For those interested in accessing the home pages of individual U.S. cities, a good starting point is USA City Link: usacitylink.com//default.html.