What does the word urban mean?

In this lecture I will discuss the concepts of urban, urbanism and urbanization.
Etymology of the word

• The word urban is derived from the Latin urbanus, urbs meaning city.
  
  
• While the Latin word for city was urbs, the resident was civis or townsman.

• Interestingly, civis is also the root of the word civitas from which the word citizenship has been derived.

• As it has been pointed out by scholars, it is not easy to define what is urban. John Palen has pointed out that there are about thirty different definitions of the urban population and none of them are completely satisfactory. “Urban settlements have been defined on the basis of an urban culture (a cultural definition), administrative functions (a political definition), the percentage of people in nonagricultural occupations (an economic definition), and the size of the population (a demographic definition)” (Palen 2008: 7). In this lecture while mentioning the administrative and demographic definitions of the urban, we will try to understand the usefulness of the very term in the Indian context.