Meaning & use
urbanization
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Meanings
noununcountable
The shift of a population from the countryside into towns and cities, and the growth of those cities as a result.
Grammar: Uncountable: rapid urbanization is changing the region, not an urbanization.
Patterns
- urbanization of something
- rapid urbanization
- urbanization in a place
Rapid urbanization has pushed the capital's population past ten million.
Economists link urbanization with rising incomes and better services.
The textbook explains how urbanization changed the country during the twentieth century.
noununcountable
The process of turning a rural area into one with buildings, roads and city-style services.
Grammar: Usually followed by of: the urbanization of farmland.
Patterns
- the urbanization of an area
The urbanization of the valley replaced orchards with apartment blocks.
Local groups opposed the urbanization of the wetlands.
Urbanization of coastal land increases flood risk.
Common combinations
- rapid urbanization
- Rapid urbanization strained the city's water supply.
- urbanization rate
- The urbanization rate has doubled in thirty years.
- drive urbanization
- Factory jobs helped drive urbanization in the nineteenth century.
- unplanned urbanization
- Unplanned urbanization led to crowded settlements without sewers.
- the effects of urbanization
- The class studied the effects of urbanization on wildlife.
Synonyms and how they differ
- city growth
- City growth is a plain phrase for expansion of a city, while urbanization also includes people moving in from rural areas.
- urban sprawl
- Urban sprawl names the uncontrolled spreading of buildings outward, and is usually negative, whereas urbanization is a neutral term.
- metropolitanization
- Metropolitanization is a rare, technical word for growth of large metro areas and is far less common than urbanization.
Opposites
Word family
- urban adjective
- relating to towns and cities
- urbanize verb
- to make an area more like a city
- urbanized adjective
- having many city features or residents
- urbanite noun
- a person who lives in a city
- suburbanization noun
- the growth of suburbs around a city
Commonly confused: urbanization or urbanity? urbanization or urban planning?
urbanization vs urbanity
Urbanity means smooth, polite and refined manners, not city growth.
urbanization vs urban planning
Urban planning is the deliberate design of a city, while urbanization is the population shift itself.
Practice
As ___ continued, more families left farms to look for work in the city.
Choose one answer.
Urbanization names the movement of people into cities. Urbanity is about manners, so it is a tempting but wrong look-alike.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “urbanization”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.