What is Urban?

When I was an urban studies student, I was always frustrated by statistics on urban areas. There were so many different ways to define a city’s borders — the city limits, the metropolitan statistical area, the region, etc. It’s very difficult to quantify an urban area or use numbers to define where a city starts and ends. A professor I once had told us a story about how they used to determine where a town’s borders were. City officials would simply look at the tracks leading in and out of people’s driveways around the edge of town. When most people’s tracks pointed away from the center of town, they assumed those people identified with another urban area.

This more human-scale assessment is related to the kind of thing Nico Larco writes about in “What is Urban?”. He doesn’t use thresholds for determining urbanity (ie: 1.56 people/acre), but defines dimensions like variety, public space (vs. community space) and memory. When one uses those dimensions to determine urbanity, it results in more human, common sense results. For instance, I grew up in a small town that geographers would consider rural. Based on Larco’s dimensions, the town is definitely urban. It’s still large enough that there are strangers, it has variety (different people, different building types), and so on. It’s a system of evaluation that just makes more sense.

I don’t think that defining urban areas using thresholds or numbers will ever disappear, but for designers, a more human approach may be more informative as we shape the urban landscape.