mindmap root((URB)) urbane Sophisticated and with polished manners.
🌱He was remembered as a gentlemanly and urbane host of elegant dinner parties. 🌳Urbane's synonyms include suave, debonair, and especially cosmopolitan. Urbanity was a trait of such classic movie stars as Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, William Powell, Leslie Howard, Charles Boyer, and George Sanders. （Notice that, for some reason, urbane is almost always used to describe men rather than women.） Teenagers in the 1960s read James Bond novels and watched his character onscreen to get tips about acquiring an urbane identity. But it's hard to acquire urbanity without actually having had wide social experience in sophisticated cities. And, since times have changed, the whole notion doesn't seem to attract young people quite the way it used to. exurban Relating to a region or settlement that lies outside a city and usually beyond its suburbs and often is inhabited chiefly by well-to-do families.
🌱Exurban areas typically show much higher education and income levels than closer-in suburbs or nearby rural counties. 🌳With its prefix ex-, （"outside of," the noun exurb was coined around 1955 to describe the ring of well-off communities beyond the suburbs that were becoming commuter towns for an urban area. Most exurbs were probably quiet little towns before being discovered by young city dwellers with good incomes looking for a pleasant place to raise their children. Planners, advertisers, and political strategists today often talk about such topics as exurban development, exurban trends, exurban migration, and exurban voters. interurban Going between or connecting cities or towns.
🌱Businesspeople in the two cities have been waiting for decades for a true high-speed interurban railway on the Japanese model. 🌳Interurban is generally used to describe transportation. As a noun （as in "In those days you could take the interurban from Seattle to Tacoma"）, interurban has meant a fairly heavy but fast electric train, something between an urban trolley and a full-fledged long-distance train, that offers more frequent service than an ordinary railway. Interurban transit today may include bus, ferry, and limousine—and, in a few lucky areas, a regional railway. With oil supplies dwindling, there's hope that interurban railways will be coming back into wider use. urbanization The process by which towns and cities are formed and become larger as more and more people begin living and working in central areas.
🌱The area has been undergoing rapid urbanization, and six or seven of the old small towns are now genuine suburbs. 🌳The word urbanization started appearing in print way back in the 1880s, which says something about the growth of American cities. The expansion of Los Angeles was an early example of uncontrolled urbanization. Urbanization is often seen as a negative trend, with bad effects on quality of life and the environment. But apartments require much less heat than houses, and commuting by mass transit rather than cars can reduce pollution and energy use, and cities offer improved opportunities for jobs （and often for education and housing as well）, so city growth doesn't make everyone unhappy.