WordNet
n. a geographical area constituting a city or town [syn: populated area] [ant: country]
Wikipedia
An aire urbaine (literal and official translation: "urban area") is an INSEE (France's national statistics bureau) statistical concept describing a core of urban development and the extent of its commuter activity. When applied to larger agglomerations, this unit becomes similar to a U.S. metropolitan area, and the INSEE sometimes uses the term aire métropolitaine to refer to France's larger aires urbaines.
An urban area is a human settlement with high population density and infrastructure of built environment. Urban areas are created through urbanization and are categorized by urban morphology as cities, towns, conurbations or suburbs. In urbanism, the term contrasts to rural areas such as villages and hamlets and in urban sociology or urban anthropology it contrasts with natural environment. The creation of early predecessors of urban areas during the urban revolution led to the creation of human civilization with modern urban planning, which along with other human activities such as exploitation of natural resources leads to human impact on the environment.
The world's urban population in 1950 of just 746 million has soared in the decades since. In 2009, the number of people living in urban areas (3.42 billion) surpassed the number living in rural areas (3.41 billion) and since then the world has become more urban than rural. This was the first time that the majority of the world's population lived in a city. In 2014 there were 7.25 billion people living on the planet, of which the global urban population comprised 3.9 billion. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs at that time predicted the urban population would grow to 6.4 billion by 2050, with 37% of that growth to come from three countries: China, India and Nigeria.
Urban areas are created and further developed by the process of urbanization. Urban areas are measured for various purposes, including analyzing population density and urban sprawl.
Unlike an urban area, a metropolitan area includes not only the urban area, but also satellite cities plus intervening rural land that is socio-economically connected to the urban core city, typically by employment ties through commuting, with the urban core city being the primary labor market.
Usage examples of "urban area".
They will run in price from $30 to $3000 an acre, with the most expensive being prime farmland in fertile river valleys located close to an urban area.
His platoon had been assigned to sweep through an urban area that was all narrow roads in a maze of cheap housing—.
By 2023 _everyone_ would live in an urban area, and by 2044 everyone would live in cities with a million or more population.
I can't find anything like an actual match with your picture anywhere, and I've had every single urban area on the globe under scrutiny.
This was the real reason why high-speed flight in an urban area was insane.
Of the others, those who thought like Henley are now facing a rather difficult problem - how do you rebuild an urban area which is now at least fifty percent underwater?
As she listened, the ship obviously came to land safely somewhere in the urban area.
This choice of a figure of speech may be excused on the part of Pulendius, I think, who was from an urban area, and on the whole, accordingly, unfamiliar with the ways of small, isolated rural communities.