A large city is stimulating and agitating, entertaining and frightening, welcoming and cold. A city has something for everyone, but a lot of those things are for people who are different from you. Urban geography helps to sort out the complexities of familiar and unfamiliar patterns in urban areas. Urban geographers are concerned with the global distribution of urban settlements as well as the distribution of people and activities within urban areas. This chapter begins by addressing why services cluster downtown. The chapter then examines models that have been developed to help explain the internal structure of urban areas in North America and in selected developing and developed areas of the world. The evolving distinctive problems of inner cities and suburbs are addressed as well as attempts to change cities to meet the needs of the future while creating a vibrant and usable space for changing societies.