Development, state and perspectives of urban geography with special review of Serbia

Urban geography is a complex and synthetic geographical discipline, which makes an immeasurable contribution to the integral and interactive perception of geographical elements and factors that have influenced the formation and transformation of settlement-geographical features. The first papers containing urban-geographical content appeared in the first half of the 19th century, but since urbanization became a worldwide process in the 20th century, it can be stated that urban geography became a geographical discipline in the 20th century. Contemporary urban development contributed to the affirmation of urban geography as an independent scientific discipline, where object of study is not only the city within its administrative boundaries, but also urban expansion (urbanization). Today, urban geography has evolved into a complex geographical discipline, where theoretical and methodological roots of knowledge corpus related to the phenomenon of the city have been shaped by an interdisciplinary approach between geography and other sciences that study the city from different theoretical and methodological angles. With the increase in the number of inhabitants in the world, cities have become ?magnets? of economic, socio-cultural and political processes. They are increasingly studied from a global perspective, while urban geography is becoming the main focus of research. In other higher education institutions in Europe, urban geography is established as a special scientific discipline. However, although it has a wide and complex subject of study and occupies a very important place in various types of social practice, urban geography is still studied in Serbia within its mainstream subject - Geography of settlements.