What does urbanizing mean?
Urbanizing means becoming urban or causing a place to become urban. As an adjective, it usually describes a place undergoing the spread of city life, infrastructure, population, or building development. As a present-participle verb, it can describe what a person, government, or process is doing: a municipality may be urbanizing farmland, or a neighborhood may be urbanizing as new apartments arrive. The word is common in planning, development, geography, and environmental discussion, where it often carries neutral or analytical tones but can also suggest a loss of rural character. Because it can describe both an ongoing transformation and the activity producing it, “urbanizing” is useful where “urbanized” would sound completed and “urbanization” would name the broader process. The term ultimately comes through French and Latin words associated with the city.
Describing a place, population, or area that is becoming urban.
"The urbanizing outskirts now contain several rapidly expanding residential districts."
This use presents urbanizing as an ongoing change and is often used with modifiers such as “rapidly” or “increasingly.”
To make a place or area urban by developing it or extending urban services, housing, and infrastructure into it.
"The redevelopment plan urbanizes a large tract of former industrial land."
Urbanizing can be used transitively, with an area as its object, or intransitively to describe an area undergoing change.
The city behind urbanizing is Latin urbs, meaning “city,” the same root found in urban, urbane, and suburban.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of urbanizing
Urbanize entered English in the early nineteenth century, borrowing the French urbaniser, which was formed from Latin urbanus, meaning “of or belonging to a city,” from urbs, meaning “city.” The present-participle form urbanizing developed from that verb. English words in the same family include urban, urbane, urbanity, and suburban.
Related word forms
How urbanizing is actually used
The word is neutral to formal and is especially common in geography, urban planning, development, and environmental contexts. British spelling generally uses “urbanising,” while American spelling generally uses “urbanizing.”
Easily confused with urbanizing
Urbanizing describes an ongoing process, whereas urbanized describes something that has already become urban.
Urbanizing is an activity or ongoing change, whereas urbanization names the broader process by which a place becomes urban.