ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which urban geography has defined the urban and what urbanization means as a process. It begins with a concise intellectual history of geography. The chapter explores the two different approaches to defining the urban in urban geography: as a territorially bounded entity based on statistical enumeration and as a social construct. It explains some of the emerging research themes within urban geography before summarizing the definitions of the urban within geography. The urban is defined as a territorially bound physical entity where social processes unfold. Such "back-to-the-city" movement was boosted by urban policies that privileged property development, home ownership, and debt financing of individual real-estate investment. The infiltration of urban into the rural does not necessarily mean that the rural is effaced by the advancement of the urban. For instance, rural industrialization characterized economic growth in mainland China in the 1980s, when reform policies encouraged China's rural collectives to establish township and village enterprises.
