It is not badly written grammatically, but it is a little ambiguous. It is saying that 'urban geography' which you are interested in focuses on 'the location of cities'. Is it the full sentence you have provided or is/was there something before .......urban geography. 'takes as it's x' means uses or needs etc, 'takes as it's focus' = 'takes as' is redundant and doesn't add anything to the meaning, until we have whatever was before 'urban geography' then it might be needed. You can simply rewrite it like Edmund suggests.

It's bad writing. The sentence simply means that urban geography focuses on....

to consider / to include