City centre is an alternative term, the usual phrase used in Britain and Ireland and also in some urban areas of British influenced countries and China.In the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand, the term is often just shortened to 'city', as in "going to the city" (This term is also used in the New York City area in the same manner, using the term 'the city' to mean Manhattan). One exception is in London where 'the City' specifically refers to the City of London financial district rather than to any other part of central London. In the UK, Australia, Kenya, New Zealand and Ireland it is often also referred to as 'town'. In Kenya "going (in)to town" usually means going to Nairobi, while going to the 'city centre' means the financial core of Nairobi now also referred to as the CBD.

A convention center, in American English, is an exhibition hall, or conference center, that holds conventions. A large, cavernous public building with enough open space to host public and private business and social events for the surrounding municipal and metropolitan areas.

In British English very large venues suitable for major trade shows are known as exhibition centres while the term "convention centre" is sometimes used for intermediate venues between exhibitions centres and "conference centres", which are much smaller and contain lecture halls and meeting rooms.

Convention centers typically offer enough floor area to accommodate several thousand attendees. Convention centers rent space for meetings such as: corporate conferences, industry trade shows, formal dances entertainment spectacles and concerts. The largest in the United States is McCormick Place in Chicago. Large convention centers located in resort areas also host conventions that attract additional visitors to the municipality. It is not uncommon for large resort area hotels to include a convention center.

Using ecological metaphors to describe business structure and operations without discussing a company’s relationships with the natural environment appears to be increasingly common especially within the field of information technology . For example, J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California – Berkeley, has written that business ecology is “the pattern of launching new technologies that has emerged from Silicon Valley” (DeLong, 2000, para. 1; also see Cohen, DeLong, and Zysman, 2000). He has defined business ecology as “a more productive set of processes for developing and commercializing new technologies” that is characterized by the “rapid prototyping, short product-development cycles, early test marketing, options-based compensation, venture funding, early corporate independence” and other qualities exhibited by Adobe Systems. DeLong has explained that the new business ecology greatly differs from the older, time-consuming method of developing new products and technologies.