Urban geography in the context of "Urbanism"

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.

A public space is a place that is open and accessible to the general public. Roads, pavements, public squares, parks, and beaches are typically considered public space. To a limited extent, government buildings which are open to the public, such as public libraries, are public spaces, although they tend to have restricted areas and greater limits upon use. Although not considered public space, privately owned buildings or property visible from sidewalks and public thoroughfares may affect the public visual landscape, for example, by outdoor advertising. Recently, the concept of shared space has been advanced to enhance the experience of pedestrians in public space jointly used by automobiles and other vehicles.

Public space has also become something of a touchstone for critical theory in relation to philosophy, urban geography, visual art, cultural studies, social studies and urban design. The term 'public space' is also often misconstrued to mean other things such as 'gathering place', which is an element of the larger concept of social space. Public spaces have often been valued as democratic spaces of congregation and political participation, where groups can vocalize their rights.

Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.

The history of urbanization focuses on the processes of by which existing populations concentrate in urban localities over time, and on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of cities. Most urban scholars focus on the "metropolis," a large or especially important city. There is much less attention to small cities, towns or (until recently) suburbs. However social historians find small cities much easier to handle because they can use census data to cover or sample the entire population. In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many of the most influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965) or Oscar Handlin (1915-2011). The field grew rapidly after 1970, leading one prominent scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, to note that urban history apparently deals with cities, or with city-dwellers, or with events that transpired in cities, with attitudes toward cities – which makes one wonder what is not urban history.

Social geography is the branch of human geography that is interested in the relationships between society and space, and is most closely related to social theory in general and sociology in particular, dealing with the relation of social phenomena and its spatial components. Though the term itself has a tradition of more than 100 years, there is no consensus on its explicit content. In 1968, Anne Buttimer noted that "[w]ith some notable exceptions, (...) social geography can be considered a field created and cultivated by a number of individual scholars rather than an academic tradition built up within particular schools". Since then, despite some calls for convergence centred on the structure and agency debate, its methodological, theoretical and topical diversity has spread even more, leading to numerous definitions of social geography and, therefore, contemporary scholars of the discipline identifying a great variety of different social geographies. However, as Benno Werlen remarked, these different perceptions are nothing else than different answers to the same two (sets of) questions, which refer to the spatial constitution of society on the one hand, and to the spatial expression of social processes on the other.

The different conceptions of social geography have also been overlapping with other sub-fields of geography and, to a lesser extent, sociology. When the term emerged within the Anglo-American tradition during the 1960s, it was basically applied as a synonym for the search for patterns in the distribution of social groups, thus being closely connected to urban geography and urban sociology. In the 1970s, the focus of debate within American human geography lay on political economic processes (though there also was a considerable number of accounts for a phenomenological perspective on social geography), while in the 1990s, geographical thought was heavily influenced by the "cultural turn". Both times, as Neil Smith noted, these approaches "claimed authority over the 'social'". In the American tradition, the concept of cultural geography has a much more distinguished history than social geography, and encompasses research areas that would be conceptualized as "social" elsewhere. In contrast, within some continental European traditions, social geography was and still is considered an approach to human geography rather than a sub-discipline, or even as identical to human geography in general.

David William Harvey FBA (born 31 October 1935) is a British-American academic best known for Marxist analyses that focus on urban geography as well as the economy more broadly. He is a Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.

In 2007, Harvey was listed as the 18th most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences in that year, as established by counting citations from academic journals in the Thomson Reuters ISI database.