alt Hacker NewsYou've been mislead by an overloaded term. Urban in an academic context is a much lower bar than urban in a "any reasonably layman's meaning of the word" context.
Pretty much any time you hear "city" or "urban" it's either a direct or indirect reference to US census data (or follow on research by other academics that uses their definitions) which play fast and loose with the word urban in a way that results in the population of even the most far out municipalities within a city's economic area being countable as urban in some capacity depending on what data set you want to use (some of the data sets draw economic distinctions rather than lifestyle ones, so a rural farmer who exists in the eoncomic gravity well of a major urban area will be counted as urban).
This is all magnified by substantially less than honest people omitting the potentially misleading nature of the term when it suits them and the people who they've informed going on to parrot it without actually understanding it.
INB4 nitpickers, it's been a decade since I've done any work with this data, if my knowledge is out of date and it's no longer misleading to the layman then good.
> Urban in an academic context is a much lower bar than urban
I said city, not urban, trying to portray a high density, well populated area. I fully recognize that the US considers a community as small as 2,000 people to be urban. And, similarly, you need as few as 1,000 people in an area in my country to fall into what is considered urban. This is all well known and understood.
That said, the 3,000 people strong town I live in has everything you need in walking distance, so the point still stands even for small urban too. But it remains that average American lives in larger, more dense communities than that, so the idea of needing transportation is quite strange and defeats the purpose of the density.