Urban Meaning: All About City Life and City Places

The urban meaning in everyday English

Most of the time, urban points to a place. An urban area is a city, a large town or the built-up zone around it. You might read about urban schools, urban hospitals, urban roads or urban jobs, and in each case the word tells you the setting is a city rather than a village or farmland.

Urban is also used for a way of life or a set of problems linked to cities: urban traffic, urban noise, urban loneliness, urban pollution. Here urban is less about a dot on the map and more about the experience of living among crowds, concrete and constant movement.

A third use shows up in style and culture, where urban is used for fashion, art or design said to come from city streets. That use is looser and some people find it vague, so in careful writing it is better to say exactly what you mean.

Seeing it in sentences

• Urban rents have climbed so fast that many young workers now share flats with three or four friends.
• The report found that urban children spend less time outdoors than children in villages.
• Our town council wants more trees along the main road to cool the urban heat.
• He trained as an urban planner and now designs bus routes for a growing city.
• Flooding hits urban districts hard because concrete does not soak up rain.

How countries count urban areas

For official numbers, a feeling of busyness is not enough. Each statistics office writes rules.

India. The census has two kinds of urban place. Statutory towns are places with a municipal corporation, municipality, cantonment board or notified town area. Census towns are other places that pass three tests together: a population of at least 5,000, a density of at least 400 persons for every square kilometre, and three quarters or more of the male main working population doing work other than farming.

United States. The Census Bureau marks an area as urban when it has at least 2,000 housing units or a population of at least 5,000, judged block by block on how densely people live. Many other agencies use their own labels, such as metropolitan areas, which group a central city with nearby counties.

Because the rules differ, an urban share of population in one country cannot always be compared directly with another.

Where the word comes from

Urban comes from Latin urbanus, meaning of the city, built on urbs, the Latin word for city. The origin of urbs itself is not known. English has used urban since the 1610s, but it stayed rare until the 1830s, when fast-growing industrial cities gave people more reason to talk about city life.

The same Latin word gave English urbane, which means polished and smooth in manner. The idea was that city people were thought to be more refined, though urbane today describes a person, not a place.

Pairings that use urban

Urban usually sits in front of a noun. Some pairings you will see often:

• urban area, urban centre, urban zone: a city or the built-up land around it
• urban planning: designing how a city grows, with roads, parks and housing
• urban sprawl: a city spreading outward in low, scattered building
• urban renewal: rebuilding run-down parts of a city
• urban legend: a strange story passed around as true, often with no real source
• urban poverty, urban housing, urban transport: city versions of wider issues

The verb urbanize means to make a place more city-like, and urbanization is the process of more people moving into towns. Someone who lives in a city and loves it can be called an urbanite.

Urban, rural, suburban and urbane

The opposite of urban is rural. Do not mix up urban and urbane: an urban street is in a city, while an urbane host is charming. For more words about places, people and public life, see the law, politics and society section, and for how roads, pipes and power lines hold a city together, read about infrastructure.

Mistakes to avoid

• Using it as a noun. Say urban areas or cities, not the urbans.
• Assuming urban means rich. Cities hold great wealth and serious poverty side by side, so urban says nothing about income.
• Spelling the verb. American English writes urbanize; British and Indian writing often use urbanise. Both are accepted where they are standard.
• Vague culture labels. When urban is used as a label for music, clothing, culture or groups of people, it can sound like a code word. Naming the actual style or place is clearer and more respectful.

A strong community can exist in a crowded tower block as much as in a village, so let urban describe the setting and let other words describe the residents.