Abstract
Urban geography is the study of urban areas in terms of population concentration, infrastructure, economy and environmental impacts. The study of urban geography has evinced interest from a wide range of experts. The multidisciplinary gamut of the subject invokes the interest from ecologists, to urban planners and civil engineers, to sociologists, to administrators and policy makers, and the common people as well. This is because of the multitude of activities and processes that take place in the urban ecosystems everyday.
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Impervious surfaces are mainly constructed surfaces—rooftops, sidewalks, roads, runways, and parking lots—covered by impenetrable materials such as asphalt, concrete, and stone. These materials effectively seal surfaces, repel water and prevent precipitation and meltwater from infiltrating soils.
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Although the literal meaning of sprawl varies across, in this literature, urban sprawl and sprawl have been used interchangeably.
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Polycentrism is the principle of organisation of a region around several political, social or financial centres. A region is said to be polycentric if it is distributed almost evenly among several centres in different parts of the region. Monocentrism, in contrast, is the organisation of a region’s political, social or financial activities centred in a single part (generally the central business district) of the region (Arnott and McMillen 2006). Modern cities are mainly polycentric. Polycentric cities are the outcome of the urbanisation and they have several advantages, for example, they reduce the traffic congestion at the city-centre, reduce the travel time as because there are multiple city-centres, and distribute the financial activities.
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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Bhatta, B. (2010). Urban Growth and Sprawl. In: Analysis of Urban Growth and Sprawl from Remote Sensing Data. Advances in Geographic Information Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05299-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05299-6_1
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