urbania en · NOUN
Etymology
From urban + -ia.
Meanings
-
(uncountable) Urban areas collectively, as opposed to suburbia.
The theory is that people flock inexorably from small towns and the countryside to live in American's cities. Why worry too much about rural housing, the reasoning goes, when people are moving to urbania anyway?
1975 February 28, Ron Hendren, “Getting a HUD-ache”, in Anne Pautler, editor, UCLA Daily Bruin, volume XCIV, number 38, Los Angeles, Calif.: ASUCLA Communications Board, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 14:Having lived in urbania all my life, I was always advised, warned and just plain harassed by all my superiors not to ever dream of thumbing a ride.
1992 March 11, Ari Vais, “Your free clip and save guide to hitchhiking etiquette”, in Mare Elliott, editor, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, volume CI, number 103, Amherst, Mass., page 5:American megalopili^([sic]) are concerned with metropolitan government—medium-sized centers are consolidating urban communities and semirural suburbs—but rural areas, where the crowding of population and other difficulties which afflict urbania are not yet problems, are unique.
1971 April 27, Dan B. Mackey II, “Testimony of Dan B. Mackey II, Executive Director, Upper Savannah Development District, Greenwood, S.C.”, in Revitalization of Rural and Other Economically Distressed Areas: Hearings Before the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session, on S. 10 […] , Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, published 1971, page 111:Despite appearances, the City Walls Project, the painted walls, have nothing to do with graffiti. Moreover, they are prior to graffiti and will survive it. The initiative for these painted walls comes from the top as an innovatory attempt to enliven urbania set up with municipal subsidies.
1993, Jean Baudrillard, “The Order of Simulacra”, in Iain Hamilton Grant, transl., Symbolic Exchange and Death, London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage Publications, →ISBN, page 81:While we all appreciate the problems of metropolitan areas, I think we are already overfeeding such sections with liberal doses of Federal money. I would like to see less Federal aid for urbania, despite the lure to the politicians of the hundreds of thousands of voters assembled in such centers.
1961 March 16, Glenn Cunningham, “A Department of Small Towns and Rural Affairs”, in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 87ᵗʰ Congress, First Session (House section), volume 107, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, published 1961, page 4221, column 1:These are the costs of ghetto life, of restricted choice of dwelling place by Negroes, of a shortage of housing, of the low-income status of Chicago's Negroes, of the segregated educational system existing in Chicago, of the cultural deprivation of the Negro community, and of the whole vicious cycle of conditions which aggravate and reproduce what is so well-known to and so disliked by all students of modern urbania.
1959 January 14, Debbie Meier, “The Public Buys a Ghetto”, in Michael Harrington, editor, Anvil and Student Partisan, volume X, number 1, New York, N.Y., →OCLC, page 19:All too often it is these that are the sweet mysteries of life in modern urbania.
1971, Desmond Morris, “Sexual Intimacy” (chapter 3), in Intimate Behaviour, New York: Random House, →OCLC, page 82:Let us ask ourselves the hard questions: Do we as a people really abhor violence? We are obviously concerned about crime. But to what extent? Perhaps our feelings about violence are not as strong as we think. With the Increasing incidence of crime there has been a sharp rise in the number of people who obtain weapons for self-defense, It is reminiscent of the era of the armed frontiersman, but the dangerous difference is that the sparse frontier has given way to heavily populated urbania. I leave to your imagination the tragic consequence of a shot fired in a downtown shopping area or even on a neighborhood street.
1970 December 7, Patrick V. Murphy, “Remarks of the Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy”, in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 91ˢᵗ Congress, Second Session (House section), volume 116, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, published 1970, page 40235, column 1:Like many other residents who had watched Vegas transform over the years, he had realized that the city was experiencing a remarkable population explosion: the opposite of Atlantic City, where the surrounding urbania declined as the casinos moved in, Vegas had been in an almost constant state of boom for the past four decades.
2003, Ben Mezrich, “Las Vegas, Present Day” (chapter 8), in Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, New York, N.Y.: Free Press, →ISBN, page 61: