Great to see the publication of this edited volume, Defining the Urban: Interdisciplinary and Professional Perspectives, from Routledge edited by Deljana Iossifova and her colleagues. It is good to see the outcome of this book that was based on various papers presented at a workshop organised by the co-editors on 9 February 2015 and held at the University of Manchester.

This chapter examines the ways in which urban geography has defined the urban and what urbanization means as a process. The chapter begins with a concise intellectual history of geography (Section 2). Section 3 explores the two different approaches to defining the urban in urban geography: as a territorially-bounded entity based on statistical enumeration (Section 3.1), and as a social construct (Section 3.2). The chapter then brings attention to some of the emerging research themes within urban geography (Section 4) before summarizing the definitions of the urban within geography (Section 5).

You can download the author copy from the LSE Research Online here.