Urbanism as a study

Urbanists distinguish urban areas from rural areas by their higher population density. They maintain that the difference in population entails a difference in the social and political order as well. Initially, some scholars^{[citation needed]} denied the social and political differences between ruraland urban areas, and insisted that there was no point in a specifically urban studies; but this debate has been largely resolved in favor of urban studies, and it is now widely accepted ^[1] that cities need to be studied separately from the country.

Having established that cities are genuinely distinct from rural areas, scholars have studied cities according to three different perspectives: theinternalist perspective, which looks at spatial and social order within a city; the externalist perspective, which views cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows; and the interstitial perspective, which attempts to reconcile the two perspectives through understanding how the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city is influenced by global, external forces, and how it influences them in turn. For example, in The Ordinary City (1997), Amin and Graham argue that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change.

"Urbanism" in its wider sense will also include the study of the interaction between the city and the rural hinterland. No city can exist without a hinterland to supply it, but, because of communications technology, this hinterland may be less easy to identify than it was in pre-industrial,agrarian societies, and furthermore the conception of how the hinterland relates to the city may change throughout history. In the Roman Empire and ancient Greece), for example, the municipium and polis were considered to consist of both "urban" centre and hinterland, with which they formed one unified social, political and economic entity.

The word urbanism is also used as a qualitative complement to the description of various urban and rural forms i.e.: informal urbanism, new urbanism, self-sufficient urbanism, sustainable urbanism, centralized or decentralized urbanism, neo-traditional urbanism, transitional urbanism, other urbanisms, etc.