37 of the theoretical problem is the ability to situare the discontinuities and continuities with

respect to one another. How could any absolute discontinuities exist without an undcrlying
2 continuity, without support, without sorne inhcrcnt process? Conversely, how can we havc

FROM THE CITY TO continuity without crises, without the appearance of new elements or relationships?

URBAN SOCIETY 'fhe specializcd sciences (sociology, political cconomy, history, human geography) have
proposed a number of ways to characterize "our" society, its rcality and deep-seated
trends, its actuality' and virtuality. Terms such as "industrial and postindustrial society,"
Henri Lefebvre "the technological society," "the society of abundance," "the lcisure society," "consumer
socicty'' and so on have been used. Each of these names contains an element of empiücal
or conceptual truth, as wcll as an clement of exaggeration and extrapolation. Instead of
the ter m "postindustrial society"-the society that is bom of industrialization ami succeeds
ít-I will use "urban society"; a term that refers to tendencies, orientations and virtualities,
mther than any preordained reality. Such usage in no way precludes a critica! examination
of contemporary reality, such as the analysis of the "bureaucratic society of contmlled
consumption."
'
\ Science is certainly justificd in formulating such theoretical hypotheses and using them
as a point of departure. Not only is such a procedure current among the scienccs, it is
'
1 necessary. There can be no science without theoretical hypotheses. M y hypothesis, which
' involves the so-called social sciences, is based on an epistemological and methodological
1
1
approach. Knowledge is not necessarily a copy or reflection, a simulacrum or simulation
of an object that is a!roatjy real. Nor doe5 it nece5sarily construct itR object for the sake of
. h b 0 completely urbaniz~d. Thi~
l'll bcgin with the following hypothesis: soclety as ee f a theory that predates knowledge, a theory of the object or its "models." Jn m y approach,
. · d t results from a process o
~'- . . li s a definition· an urban societ;• JS a socJety la
hypowesJS 1tnp e · il1 become real in the future. the object is included in the hypothesis; the hypothesis comprehemls the object. Even
complete urbanization. This urbanization is virtual today, but w though this "object" is located outside any (empírica!) fact, it is not fictional. \Ve can

. . . h
. f our tenns. The words "urban assume the ex.istence of a virtual oljert, urban society; that is, a possib!e olject, whose growth
The above defi.nition resolves any ambJgutty m e me o
t . . k ¡· h and development can be analyzed in rdatjon toa process anda praxis (practica! activity).
b ¡ eratlon· the Gree po !S, t e
. , are often used to refer to any city or w: an agg om · . Needless to say, such a hypothcsis must be validated. There is, however, no shortage of
so~ety'l ¿· 1 city commercial and industrial cities, small citics, the megalopolis. As a
arguments and proofs to sustain it, from the simplest to the most complex.
:~::::J;J:h::o:;:sion:we have forgotten or overlookell the. social rdatido~fs~ipssc ~:~::~~~~
. h hi 1 h rban tvpe 1s assoctate · 1e. ·
. h. . ¡ ¡)roduction) w1t w e 1 eac u ~ · . . Poc '"'n¡,lt,agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industriali7.ed
re Jauons 1ps o h h h r notlung m
urban societies are often compared with one another, even thoug t ey a\ e .
lli"ioe" ''nd as part of a global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the economy,
eh a m ove serves the underlying ideologies of organidsm (every urban _socl~ty,l
comrnon. Su · f histonca meven, sector characterized by any distinctive features (aúde fmm underdevelopment).
. . . " h ") continuúm (there 1s a sense o
. d its own 15 scen as an organtc w o1e ' . . though local and regional features from the time when agricultura! production
vtewe on ' . . ttd with urban society), and evofutionism (urban socJety IS
· ·t, or pcrrnanence assoCla nn,tedhaven't entirely disappeared, it has been changed into a form of industrial
:~::~::~zed by different periods, by the transforrnation of social relations that fade away mcnc,n,h,vnegbecome subordinate to its demands, subject to its constraints. Economic
or disappear). industrialization have become self legitimating, extending their effects to entire
~""'"''"'n", nations and continents. As a result, the traditional unit typical of peasant
"" 1 u··e the term "urban socicty" to refer to the society that results from i~dustrializati.on,
H e •.._, ~ d · 'fh¡ · urban society the village, has been transformed. Absorbed or obliterated by larger units, it
hi h is a process of domination that absorbs agticultural pro ucuon. s
an integral part of industrial production and consumption. The concentration
:an:ot take shape conceptually until the end of a pto~ess dur~gwhich:~ i~d :::aa:t ::~::: eo¡ml,cion goes hand in hand with that of the mode of production. The urban
the end result of a series of discontinuous transformauons, butst apart. P
Jabrit grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression,
"urban fabric," docs not nanowly define thc built world of citíes but all marúfestations of
the Jominance of thc city over the country. In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a
supermarket in the countryside are all part of the mban fabi'ic. Of varying density, thickncss
and accivity, the only regions untouchcd by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that
are given over to "nature." \'\!ith the decline of the village life of days gone by, agricultura[
producers, "farmers," are confronted with the agriculturaltmvn. Promised by Khrushchev
to the Soviet peasants, agricultura! towns have appeared in various places around the
wodd. In the United States, aside from ccrtain parts of the South, peasants have virtually
disappearcd, and we lind islands of farro povcrty alongside íslands of urban poverty. As
this global process of industrialization and urbanization was taking place, the largc cities
exploded, giving rise to growths of dubious value: suburbs, residential conglomerations
and industrial complexes, satellite cities that diffett:d little from utbarúzed towns. Small
and midsi7.e cities became dependencies, parcial colonies of the metropolis. In this way my
hypothesis serves both as a point arrival for existing knowledgc and a point of departure
for a new study and new projects: complete urbarúzation. The hypothesis is anticipatory.
It prolongs the fundamental tendency of the present. Urban society is gestating in and
through thc "bureaucratic sodety of controlled consumption."
A negative argument, proof by the absurd: no other hypothesis will work, no other
hypothesis can covet the en tire rangc of problcms. Postindustrial society? Then what
happens after industrialization? Leisme society? This addresses only pan of the question,
sincc wc limit our cxamination of trends and virh1alitif's to "infrasttucture," a realist attih1de
that in no way circumvents the demagoguery inherent in this definition. The imlcfinite
growth of mass consumption? Here, we mea~ure curn:nt índices and extrapolare from
thetn, thereby running thc risk of reducing reality and virtuality to only one of their aspects.
Aml so on.
The exprcssion "urban society" mects a theorctical need. It is mote than simply a literary
or pedagogical device, or even the exptcssion of sorne form of acquired knowledgc; it
is an elaboratio1~, a scarch, a conceptual formulation. A movement of thought toward
a cenain concrete, and pethaps toward the concrete, assumes shape and detail. This
movement, if it proves to be true, willlcad to a practice, urban pmctice, that is Gnally or
newly comprehended. Needless to say, a thrcshold will have to bt: crossed befare entering
thc concrete, that is, social practice as understood by theory. But therc is no empirícal
recipe for fabricating this product, this utbanreality. Isn't this what we so often expect
from "urbanism" and what "urbanists" so oftcn promise? Unlike a fact-filled empirícism
with its rísky extrapolations and fragments of indigestible knowledge, we can build a
thMJ from a theoretical kypothesis. The development of such a theory is associated with a
methodology. For example, research involvinga virtual object, which attempts to define and
realize that object as pan of an ongoing project, airead y has a 'o ame: tmnsduction. The ter m
reflects an intellectual approach toward a possible object, which we can employ alongside
the more cohventional activities of deduction and induction. The conccpt of an urban
society, which I introduced above, thus implies a hypothesis anda definition.
Similarly, by "urban revolution" I refcr to the transformations that affect contemporary
society, mnging from the period when questions of growth and indnstrialization
predominate (models, plans, programs) to the period when the urban problematic
becomes prcdominant, when the search for solntions and modalities unique to urban
sodety are foremost. Sorne of these transformations are sudden; others are gJ"adual,
planned, determined. But which ones? This is a lcgitimate question. lt is by no means
certain in advance that the answer will be clear, intellectually satisfying, ot·unambiguous.
The words "urban revolution" do not in themselves refer to action~ that are violent. Nor
do they exclude them.
But how do we disctiminate between the outcomc of violent action and the product of
racional action before their occuncnce? Isn't violence charactcrized by its ability to spin out
of control? lsh't thought characterized by the effort to reduce vúJlence, bcginning with the
effort to destroy thc chains that bind our thought?
There are two aspects of urbanism that we will need to address:
For years, scholars have viewed urbanism as a social practice that is fundamentally
sciehtific and technical in nature. ln this case, theory can and should addrcss this
practice by raising it toa conceptuallcvcl and, more spccifically, to lhf' if'vel of
epistemology. However, thc absence of any such urban epistemology is striking. ls
it worth developing such an epistemology, thcn? No. In fact, its absence is highly
significan t. For the instil!.tfional and ideologiral nature of what is refened to as urbanism
has-until a new ordel' comes into being-taken prcccdence over its scientific nalure.
If we assume that this procedure can be gencralized and that understanding always
involves epistemology, then it is dear that it plays no role in contempot'ary urbanism.
-It is important to understand why and how.
it currently exists, that is, as a policy (having institutional ancl ideological
urbanism can be criticized both from the right and the left. The
ftom the right, which is well known, is focused on the past and is frcquently
)'"""''"'· It subsumes and justifies a ncoliberal ideology of"free enterprise"; directly
It opcns a path for thc vatious "prívate" initiatives of capitalists and
critique from the lcft, frequently overlooked, is not associated with any
leftist group, club, party, apparatus or ideology. Rather, it attempts to o pe~
the possible, to explore and delineatc a landscape that is not met'ely pan
"rea 1,
, t he accomplished, occupied by existing social, political ancl cconomic
Itisauto~>·
'f:wn ··
crltlquc b ecause lt
· steps back from the real without, howcver,
of it.
 41 of the
of th city .after
T thc. destruction
. of Athens and Rom e, after t h e most tmportant
. ptoducts

but~o t~:::::::::: r:::~:s

We can draw an axis as follows: ose C1Vllzat10ns, logtc and law, were lost from view The lo os .
"hbirt.h was nliot attributed to the renaissance of the urban \;otld
0-------------------- 100%
T .e mnona sm that cul m ¡na t e¿ 1n
· D escartes accompanied thc reversa! that re laced the·
prtmacy of the peasantry with thc ptiotit)' of utban Ji fe. Although the peasantrj;didn't see
The axis runs from the complete absence of urbanization ("pure nature," the earth rt as su ch. Howcvet, during this pe1"iod, the image o/!he ci(J' camt into being.
abandoned to the elements) on the.left to the completion of the process on the tight.
A signifter for this signifi.ed-the m·han (the urban reality)-this axis is both spatial and The c_ity had writing; it had secrets and powcrs, and clarifted the opposition b
(c~ltuted) and rusücity (naive and brutal). After a cenain point in time :~v:~~
t\
temporal: spati.al because the process extends through space, which it modifies; temporal urbarut)'
because it develops over time. Temporality, initially of secondary importance, eventually developed
. tts own form of writing: thc map m pi.an, t h e sctence
. '
of planimety. Durio the
t)
becomes thc predominant aspect of practice and history. This schema presents no more srxteenth and
. . seventecnth centuties ' whe n thi s reversa! of meamng
, took place map'
g of
than an aspect of this history, a division of time that is both abstract and arbitrary and b cltles hegan to ap pear, me ·,.., o ¡ p atls.
· ¡u ¿·tng the fi.rst maps of thc Cl-¡ . 'T h est are
E,uropean
t
givcs rise to operations (periodizati.ons) that havc no absolute privilegc but are as necessary no yet a .stract
. maps, projectiom of urban space o n t o geometnc : coordina . tes A ,cross
between vtston
. and conce p t, wor·kso f art and science, they displayed the CÍt)' from
· to t
~
(relative) as other divisiom ...
bottom,
_. ¡ tn perspective,
¡ ·¿ · painted, depicted and gcometi"Ícallv- describcd
· · Th"ts pers¡)ecttveo
• • • s1mu
. taneous
. y 1. ealist. ancl rcalist-th e perspectlve
. . . of thought and power-was situated,
10 th~ vertldcal dt~enslOn, the dimension of knowledge and reason, and dominated and
At one moment in the history of the European West, an event of gn:at importance ',. Th"!S S¡11·rt of soual
. realitY' toward
th~ u<·b·n •hi ( l . )
¿· · · a totality·· the eÍh'
constttute " " , s re attvc
occurred, but onc that remained latent because it went unnoticed. The importance of the .Jsconttnutty, can be easily indicated on a space-time axis, whosc continuiry can be used t(
city for the social whole became such that thc whole seemed to shift. ln the rdationship sttuatc
. and date any. (rdative) breaks. All th at rs
. nec d ed Js
. to dmw a linc bctween the· :>:eto'
between town and countty, the emphasis was still on the countryside: real propetty wealtb, pomt and the termmal point (which T'll assume to be one hundred). .
the ptoducts of the soil, attachment to the land (owners of fi.efs ot noble titles). Compared
with thc countrydde, tb<> town retained its heterotopic character, marked by its ramparts

:~' ~';.""~'
rii~sorÍMf'd

:::'~,:~::~::
This reversal of mcaning can't h<> from ¡·he erowth of comme . .
as well as the uansition to suburban areas. Ata given moment, these various telationsbips
of •he mnkct. lt w" che Ü>e of che mm,nülc cüy, which
werc reverscd; tbe situation changed. The moment when this shift occurred, this reversa!
w:s ~:~:~a llctty ~1.~ promoted its own ascendancy, that was primarily respon~ibk. This
of heterotopy, should be marked along our axis. From this momcnt on, the city ·would no l Th. o o_we Y the appearance of mdustrial capital and, conset¡uentlv thc industrial
longer appear as an urban island in a rural occan, it would no longer secm a paradox, a
'''"unu lS.
C![J. requues· further
. . a ti on. Was 111
explan · d ustty associated with the city?
·' Une would
monster, a hell or heaven that con.trasted shatply with villagc or country life in a natural ;,c:knc,w>h••
· lt to. be assoCJated
. . . w 1th the non-al)',
· t11C absence 01" rupturc of urban · reality. We
environment. It entercd people's awarcness and understanding as one of the terms in mdulstry lntttally developed near the sourccs of energy (coa] and water) ,.•,,
the opposition between town and country. Country? It is now no mote tban-nothing (metastet"l) d '"''
,,·, ,· h' fx 1 es' an manpowcr ¡·esetves. lndustry graduallv made its wav into
more than-the town's "environment," its horizon, its lirnit. Villagcrs? As far as they were " Y n seat·c o cap!"ta¡ an ¿ cap!tahsts,· · markcts, andan abundant ' suppl\' of l · .
con cerned, they no longer worked for the territoriallords, they produced for the city, fot the could 1 t · . lf · . ow-cost
•¡¡,;"'' ,,., [,, oca e Itse ltsclf anywhere, thetefore, but sooner ot later made its wav int
urban markei. And everi though they realized that the wheat and wood merchants exploited or. created · · a¡though it was prepared to move elsewhere if.thereo
" d new CJtles,
them, they understood that the patb to fteedom crossed the marketplace. , onomtc a. vantage in domg · so. Just as the pohncal
. . clty
. resistcd thc conquest-
. . metchants, exchange and money, similadv the política!
So what is happening around this crucial moment in history? "fhoughtful peopie no longer ~Jty _defended itself from being taken over by a nasccnt indu:ttv industrial
see themselves reflected in narure, a shadowy wotld subjcct to mysterious fot·ces. Betwcen capttalttself. llut how did ¡t d o t h !S.
· ;> Through corporatism, by cstablishing
'' ' '
them and nature, betwecn theit home (the focal point of thought, existcnce) and the
world, lies tbe urban reality, an essential mediating factor. From this moment on, society no
longer coincides with thc counttysidc. It no longer coincides with the city, either. The state . e\ o ¡utlon
.continuity and T · mask the effects and ruptures associated with such
encompasses them both, joins them in its hcgemony by making use of thcir rivalry. Yet, at · something strange a n d won der ful was abo taking place which h 1 d
'hou,gh•
thc time, tbe majesty of the state was veiled to its contemporarics. Of whom or what was ¡e :thenon- ·, , . ' epe rtnew
Clt} and the antl-CJty would conquer the city, penctratc it,
rcason an attribute? Royalty? Divine right? The individual? Yet this is what led to the reform
break it apatt, and in so doing extend it immeasutably, btinging about the mbanization
of society and the growth of the urban fabtic that coveted what was lcft of the city
prior to thc anival of industry. This extraordinary movement has escaped out attention
and has been desctibcd in piecemeal fashion because ideologues have ttied to eliminate
dialectical thought and the analysis of contradictions in favor of logical thought-that is,
the identification of coherence and nothing but coherencc. Urban rcality, simultaneously
amplified ancl exploded, thus loses the features it inherited from the previous petiod:
organic totality, belonging, an uplifting image, a sense of space that was measured and
dominated by monumental splendor. Tt was populated with signs of the urban within the
dissolution of utbanity; it became stipulative, repressive, marked by signals, summary codes
for circulation (routes), and signage. It was sometimes read as a mugh draft, somctimes as
an authoritarian message. Tt was impetious. But non e of these desctiptive terms completely
describes the historical proccss of implosion-explosion (a metaphor bonowed from nuclear
physics) that occurred: the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods,
objccts, instruments, means and thought) of urban reality and thc immensc cxplosion, the
projection of numcrous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, subu1·bs, vacation homes, satellite
towns) into space.
The indushiai city (often a shapelcss town, a barely utban agglomeration, a conglomerate ot
conutbation like the Ruhr Valley) serves as a prelude toa critka! zonc. At this moment, the
effects of implosion-explosion are most fully felt. The increase in industrial production is
superimposed on thc gtowth of commercial exchange and multiplies thc number of such
cxchanees. This gmwth extends from simple barrer to the global market, from the simple
exchange between 1:\vo imlividuals all the way to the exchange of products, works of att,
ideas and human bcings. Buying and selling, merchandise and market, money and capital
appear to swcep away all obstacles. During this period of generali7.ation, thc effect of
the process-namely the urban teality-becomes both cause and reason. Induced factors
become dominant (inductors). The urban problematic becomes a global phcnomenon. Can
urban reality be defined as a "superstructure" un the sutface of the economic sttuchu'e,
whethcr capitalist or socialist? The simple result of gtowth and pmductive forces? Simply
a modest marginal rcality compared with production? Not at all. Utban reality modifies thc
relations of production without being sufficicnt tn transform them. lt becomes a productive
force, like science. Space·and the politics of space "express" socialrelationships but react
against thcm. Obviously, if an urban teality manifests itself and bccomes dominant, it does
so only through the urban ptoblematic.
What can be done to change this? How can we build cities or "something" that replaces
what was formerly the City? How can we reconceptualizc the urban phenomenon? How
can we formulate, classify and arder the innumerable questions that arisc-questions that
move, although not without considerable resistance, to the forefront of our awateness?
Can we achieve significant progress in theory and ptactice so that our consciousness can
comprehcnd a reality that overflows it and a possible that flees befote its grasp?
We can represcnt this process as follows:
Political Mercantile Industrial Critical
city ---+ city city zone
o---------------+--------------~100%
tronsition from agrarian
to urban
1
impfosion,expfosion
(urban concentration, rural
exodus, extension of the urban
fabric, complete subordination
of the agrarian to the urban}
What occurs during the oiticalphase? ... Are the theoretical assumptions that enable us to
draw an axis such as the one shown above, introduce directed time, and make sensc of the
critica! zone sufficient to help us umlerstand what is taldng place? Possibly. ln any event,
thete are severa! assumptions we can make now. Lacking any proof to the conttary, we
can postulare that a second transition occurs, a second reversa! of direction and situation.
Industriali7.ation, the dominant power and limiting factor, becomcs a dominated reality
duting periods of profound crisis. This results in tremendous confusion, during which the
past and the possible, the best and thc worst, become intett\vined.
In spitc of this theoretical hypothesis concerning the possible and its relation to the
actual (the "real"), we should not ovcrlook the fact that the onset of urban societ;' and
the modalities of urbanization depend on the charactcristics of society as it existed
duting the course of industtialintion (ncocapitalist or socialist, full economic growth
or in tense automation). The onsct of urban society at different times, the implications
and consequences of thcse inicial differences, are part of the problematic associated with
thc urban phenomenon, or simply the "urban." These tenns are preferable to the word
"city," which appears to designa te a dearly defi.ned, definitive ofyect, a scientific object
and the immediate goal of action, whereas thc thcoretical apptoach reL¡uites a critique
of this "object" anda more complcx notion of the virtual or possible object. \X'ithin this
perspective there is no sciencc of the city (such as mban sociology ot urban economy), but
an emerging understanding of the ovetall process, as well as its term (goal and dircction).
The urban (an abbreviated form of urban socicty) can thcrcfore be defined notas an
.accomplished teality, situated behind the actual in time but on the contrary as a horizon
' ' , '
an illuminating virtuality. It is the possible, defined by a ditection, that moves toward
the urbanas the culmination of its journcy. To reach it-in other words, to realizc it-
must first overcome ot break through the obstacles that currently makc it impo.r.rible.
 a large part in. thc development of a bod)' 0 f d octrme . known as urbanism 'f ·
oul' e:x:ploratlon of the blind ficld , we had to .]Ctttson
.. h . o contmue
t at opaque, heavy body: thc urban
Can theoretical knowledge treat this vittual object, the goal of action, as an absttaction?
No. Ftom this point on, it is abstract only in the sense that it ís a scientific, and thereforc phcnomenon in its totality.
legitimate, abstraction. 'fheoretical knowledge can and must reveal the terrain, the
foundation on which it resides: an ongoing social prnctice, an :urban practice in thc process
of formation. It is an aspect of the critica\ phase that this practice is currently veiled and .
.
The unconscious (the boundary between th
.
m!sunderstands) . sometimes as a decept!ve
appears
,=--~~=-
. d
. and blinding emergcnce of a rural and
disjointed, that it possesses only fragments of a reality anda science that are still in the mdustrml past, somctHnes as a sense of lo ss ¡:;or an urb an teality
. that is slipping away.
future. It is out job to demonstrate that such an approach has an outcomc, that there are
solutions to the current problematic. 'fhe rb·tual object is nothing but planetary society In :.s vr~y, the notion of a critica! zonc or phase comes into Yiew. \Vithin this zone the
and the "global city," and it stands outside the global and planetary crisis uf rcality and terram
k fhes befote _us, the grouncl
. _ is booby-trapped. Although th e 0 Id concepts no longer
'
thought, outside the old borders that had been drawn when agticultute was dominant
and that were maintained during the growth of e:xchange and industrial production.
Nevertheless, the urban problematic can't absorb every problem. 'fhere are problems
that are unique to agriculture and industry, even though the urban reality modifies them.
- -mp-
wor

Still,
. we have
.
. are bcgwmng to take shape · Rca li t}, 1sn
. 'f, bnew. concepts . ,t the only thing

. .in elaborating a cohetent ¿·1scourse ~'-

succeeded
. ro grr thought

. non-!deological
u1at !S .
•
and that
Moreovet, the urban problematic rcquires that we exercise considerable caution when !S both oj the urban (ms!de an emergent mban universe), and aboutthc urban d .· . -
exploring the real m of the possible. It is the analyst's responsibility to identify and describe outlining
. . its . contours). .This .kind of discourse
' can ncver b e completed. Its (incompletion
escnbmg Jt,

thc various forros of urbanization and explain what happens to the forms, functiom and . . .part of us exlstcnce. It is. le
IS an cssentlal l fi ne d as a rcflectwn
. of the future im )lvin
urban structures that are ttansformed by the breakup of the ancient city and the process operatlons
. m time as well as space: transducti on (constructlon
. . of a Virtual
. object) L thg
' and
¿ th hilof the possible-impossible.
.cxploratlon . Thc temporal dimcn:;JOn,
.- cvacuated by epistemologve
of generalized urba'o.ization.
,. an e 1p osophyof
· · knowledge,
. ,_~
Js victoriouslv· reintroduccd · Yet "ans·ductlon
. JS. not long-'
Until now, the critical phase was perceivcd as a kind of black bo:x. \We know what cnters the -, range p anru~g. ~kc urbamsm, it has Leen called into question; like urbanism it contains a
box, and somet:imes we sce what comes out, but we don't lmow what goes on inside. 'fhis ~~"''"'"l"c"mtxes Jdeology and suentilicity. Ilcre, as elsewhere, scicmificity is an ideology a~
malres conventional procedures of fotecltscing and projection usdess, sin ce they extrapola te gmfted onto real, but fragmentary, knowledge. And like urbanism 1 '
also e t · 1 ¡ · , ong-mnge
from the actual, from a set of facts. Projections and forecasts have a determined basis only x rapo ates rom a reductive position.
in the fragmentary sciences: dcmogtaphy, for example, or political economy. I3ut what is at
this c:x:ploration' the urban ph enomenon appears as somcthing other than as
stake hcre, "objectively," is a totality.
more
f l'vf than,
· a supcrstJ'ucture (of the mode of puJduction) 1 "")"h',.
0
"
' ' '.
' 1s m response

• • • .o. at:x:lst dogmatism that manifcsts itself in a varict-y of wa¡'s. 'fh b

!S woddwid Th e ur an
th . e. e samc problems are found in socialism and in capitalism-
1'he concept developed earlier as a (scientific) hypothesis can now be approached h e failure to rcspond · U l ·b an soc1ety
· can only be clcfined as global. Virtual}v
differently. 1 hope that rcaders will have a better understanding of it now that it has been t e planet by
¡ recrcating natme, which has beco wipecl out b"_.,c,nustna
'"h ; d ,l.
freed somewhat of ib:; earlier theoretical status. However, the process is far from complete, natura resources (material and "human") , b'
>occicuhui<·o" 1 destrucoon
} tle . of so-ca!led
and it wouid be dogmatic to claim that it was. 'fo do so wouid mean inserting the concept
of an "urban society" into a questionable epistemology that we should be wary of because
it is premature, because it places the categorical above the problematic, thereby halting, and t"""'l'"' ph'. oomc.ncm has hada profound effect on the methods of production:
possibly shifting, the very movement that brought the urban phenomenon to the threshold d rclat!onships' of p ro d uctlon,
· and thc contradictions between them It
an .accentuates ' on .a ne w P¡am:, t h e SOCial
. character of productive labor
·
of awareness in the ürst place.
wtthf the ownersh!p
. (pe'!vate) 0 f t h e means of pmduction. It continues
'fhe concept of an urban society has freed itself from the myths and ideologies that 0 soctety"
. , . which is anot h er way of saying that the urban does not
bind it, whether they arise in thc agrarian stages of history and consciousness or in ,
contradJctlons . It ¿ oes not resolve them fol' the sale ¡·eason that it has
an unwarranted extension of the representations borrowed fwm the corporate sphcre , Wh ats
. . more , th e con¡:¡·lcts mherent
· in production (in thc relation h'
cap1talist ownersh'lp as wcll as Jn
. " SOC!alist"
. . s 1ps
society) hinder the urban
(industrial rationalism). Myths become a patt of literaturc; their poctic and utopian
character in no way diminishes their attraction. We also know that ideology has played
 These considerations evoke the pwdigious extension of the urban to the entire planet-
phenonu:non, prevent urban development, reducing it t~ ~rowth, This is particulady true that is, urban society, its virtualities ami poten tia!. It goes without saying that this extension-
of the action of the state under capitalism and state soc!ahsm. expansion is not going to be problem-free. Tndeed, ir has been shown that the urban
phenomenon tends ro overflow borders, whilc commercial cxchange and industrial and
. l · h th transition from the rural
To summarize then: society becomes increasmgly comp ex wlt ~ . . financia! organizations, which once seemed to abolish those territoriallimits (through the
to the industrial and from the industrial to the urban. This multtfaceted comple:KJ.ficatlon global market, through multinationals), now appeat to reaffirm them. In any event, thc
" wcll as time for the complexification of space and the objects that occupy
a ffects space ao ' . · · th effects of a possiblc rupture in industry and finance (a crisis of ovetproduction, a monetary
space cannot occur without a complexification of time and the actlvltles at occur over ci"isis) would be accentuated by an extension of the ut·ban phenomenon and the formation
time. of urban society ...

¡ · h" that are defined by

Th" pace is occupied by interrelated networks, re atJons lps . Part of my analysis may appear at first glance to correspond to the so-called Maoist
int:f:ence. Its homogencity corresponds to intentions, unified s.tr~tegies, and syste.mattzed
interpretation of thc "global cüy"; but this interpretation raiscs a number of objections.
. •he one hand and reductive, and consequently simplifymg, representatlons, on
logKs,on. ' . ¡ · thi· ce There is nothing that prevents emerging cenrers of power fwm encountering obstades and
.t.. .t.. At the same time, differences beco me more pronounced m popu atmg s. spa ,
ute outer. · · tilc and failing. What's more, any contradictions that occur no longer take place between city and
which tends, like any abstract space, toward homogeneity (quantltattve, ge~me . ' countty. The ptincipal contradiction is shifted to the mban phenomenon itself: between
. ·' ) Thi~ in turn results in conflict anda strange sense of unease. l'or thls space
log.tcaJ. spacc . ~, ' 1 f the centrality of power and othet· fottns of ccntrality, between tht "wtalth-power" center
tends toward a unique code, an absolutc system, that of ~x~hange a~d exchange va ue, ~ 1 and the petiphery, between integration and segregation.
the lo .cal thing and the logic of things. At the same time, lt !S fillcd _w!th subsystems, partta
codes~messages, and signili.ers that do not become part of the un!tary procedure that the A complete examination of thc critica! phase would far exceed thc scope of this tcxt. As an
space stipulates: prescribes, and inscribes in various ways .. cxamplc, what remains of the classic notions of history and historicity? The critica! phase
can leave neither these concepts nor the corresponcling reality intact. Does the extension
Th concept of complexification continues to be of service. Jt is theoretically ba~ed on of the urban phenomenon, the formation of a time-space diffcrcntial on a global scale,
theedistinction between growth and develnpment, a distinction imposed by the penad, by
have any relationship to what is still called "historicity"?
. •• by a consideration of results. Marx distmguished growlh and development
expetlen,._.,._., li B f M rx
nl because he wanted to avoid any confusion between quantity and qua ty. ut or a
This phase is accompanied by the emergence of complex entities, new functions and
~heygrowth (quantitative) and development (qualitative) of society coul~ and must occur
structures, but this does not mean that the old ones necessarily disappear. Por this teason,
th" · th ·ase Growth can occur
o,·multaneously. Unfortunately, history shows that !S ls not e. ' . what is callcd for is a rcpcatcd, and repeatedly refined, analysis of the relations bctwccn
~ h th For half a
without development and sometimes development can occur wlt out gro~v · .. form and content. Here I've limited myself to the batest outline, consisting of a handful of
h while rigid social and pohttca1
century, growth has been at work jmt about everyw ere, , . . markers and directional anows. \Xihat is most important is to demonsttate that the dialectical
relations have been maintained. Although the Soviet Union underwent a penad ~f mtense
method can cxcrcise its revenge. And why not? Swept aside by thc stratcgy (idcological and
d 1 ment between 1920 and 1935, objective "factors," namely the pwductlve forces
eve op , . d h rowth targets used as institutional) of the industrial period and corpotate rationalism, replaced by an advocacy
that were left behind by this "superstructute' explosJOn an t e g , of the opetational, deprecatcd by proccdurcs that are rcductivc and generalizing (primarily
strategic objectives-means construed as ends-soon took their revenge. Wasn t the sat~e
structuralism), dialectical thought reasserts its rights. As 1 stated earlicr, the key issue, in
. f M 1968;¡ The law of unequal developmcnt (T"emn)
true of France after the exp los1on o ay · the fullest and most accurate sense of the word, that of centrality, demands a dialectical
should be extended, expanded and formulated in such a way that lt can account fot the
analysis. The study of thc logic of space leads to the study of its contl:adictions (and thosc
conflict between growth and developmcnt that was revealed dunng the coursc of the
of space-timc). Without that analysis, the solutions to the pmblem are merely dissimulated
twentieth century. strategies, hidden beneath an apparcnt scicntificity. On the theotetical leve\, one of the
severest cr·itiques of urbanism as a body of doctrine (not altogethcr succcssful) is that it
The theory of complexification anticipares thc revenge of development ovet growth. T~e
harbors a sociologic anda strategy, while it evacuares dialectical thought in general and the
. · 1 · ·t beginning The bas!C
. . f <-<ho theory of urban society. Thls revenge ¡s on y ¡us . diolwi"'hnovcmcon« specific to urbanism in particular-in othcr words, words, interna!
same 1s true oL • ·
. . d fi · l d th t the means can remam an
proposition, that growth cannot contmuc m e rute y a~ a old and new (one aggravating and masking the other).
end without a catastrophe occurring, still seems paradoxlcal.
Is the urban phenomenon the total social phenomenon long sought for by sociologists? Yes everything, including detcrminisms, heterogeneous materials ami contents, prior ordcr

and no. Yes, in the sense that it tends toward totality without ever achieving it, that it is and disorder, conflict, preexisting communications and forms of communication. As a

essentially totalizing (centrality) but that this totality is never cffected. Yes, in the sense transforming form, the urban destructurcs and restructures its elements: the messages and

that no parcial determinism, no fragmentary knowledge can exhaust it; it is simultaneously codes that arise in the industrial and agrarian domains ...

historical, demographic, gcographic, economic, sociologic, psychologic, semiologic ami so

on. It "is" that and more (thing or non-thing) besides: form, for example. In orhcr words, There is no mod.el for determining the urban through irs elemcnts or conditions (what

a void, but one thar demands or calls forth a content. 1f the urban is total, it is not total it brings togcther-contents and activities). Models borrowed from thc ficlds of energy
in the way a thing can be, as content that has been amassed, bur in the way that thought (devices that capture finite, but considerable, quantities of energy) and information (which

is, which continues its activity of concentration endlessly but can never hold or maintain uses minute amounts of cnergy) are also inappropriate here. In other words, if we want to

that state of concentration, which asscmbles elemcnts continuously and discovets whar it find a model, an analytk study of the urban can supply them. But in practice, rhis has more

has assembled through a new and different form of concentration. Centrality defines the todo with a path (sensc and direction, orientation and hoüzon) than a model.

u-topic (thar which has no place and searches for it). The u-topic defines ccntrality.
This means that there is nothing harmonious about the utban as form and reality, for it also
But neither thc separation of fragment and content nor their confused union can define incorporates conflict, including class conflict. Whar is more, it can only be conceptualized

(and thercfore express) the urban phenomenon. I 1or it incorpora tes a total rmding, combining in opposition to segregation, wlúch attempts to resolve conflicts by separating the elemenls

the vocabularies (partial readings) of geographers, demographers, economists, sociologists, in space. This segregation produces a disaggregation of material and sociallife. To avoid

semiologists and others. These read.ings take place on d.iffcrent levcls. The phenomenon contradiction, to achieve a purported sense of harmony, a certain fonn of urbanism prefers

cannot be defined by their sum or synthcsis or supcJ·position. In this sense, it is not a thc d.isaggregation of the social bond. The urban presents itself as a place of conflict and
confrontation, a unity of conttadictions .
totality ..

Thc ut·ban is not produced like agriculrure or indusrry. Yet, as an acr that assemblcs and We can now identify and fotmulate a number of urban Jaws. These are not positive laws, the

distributes, it does create. Similarly, manufacturing at one time became a productive force laws assodated with an "arder of otders," ora mude! of equilibrium or growth thal should

and economic category simply he.nnJsc it btoughr together labor and tools (technology), be followed or imitated, the laws of an inicial affitmation from which consequences can

which were formerly dispersed. In this sensc, the urban phenomenon contains a praxis be deduced, or some final analysis that would result in various propositions. No, these are

(urban practicc). Its form, as such, cannot be reduced to other forms (it is not isomorphous . _primarily, esscntially, negative laws and precepts.

with othcr forms and srructute~), but it absorbs and transforms them.
We musr break down the bartiers that block the path and maintain the urban field

Although the urban consolidares diffetences and engenders difference witlún thc things it in thrall to the blind.ing-blindcd (especially in terms of the quantitative aspects of

brings together, it cannot be defined as a system of differences. Either the word "system" growth).

implies fulfillment and closurc, intelligibility through completion, or it implies nothing

more than a cc1·rain kind of cohercnce. Bur rhc urban phcnomenon is madc manifest We musr put an end tu separation, to the sepatation betwcen people and things, wlúch

as movcment. Therefore, ü cannot achieve dosure. The centrality and the dialcctical brings about multiform segregations, the separation between messages, information,

contrad.iction ir implies exclude do sute, that is to say, immobiliry. Evw if language appears codes, and subcodes (in shoi"t, the forros of sepatation that block qualitative

to be a dosed system, the use of language and thc production of d.iscourse shattet this developmenr). But in the existing arder, what separares imagines itself to be solid;

perception. Consequently, we cannor define the urban by means of a system (defi.nite); what dissociates is conscious of its power; what divides judges itsdf to be positive.

for example, as a series of deviations around invariant points. ln facr, the vcry concept
predudes our ability to mandare anything that reduces or suppresses differences. Rather, it We must overcome the obstacles that enhance the opacity of relationships and the

would imply the freedom to produce d.ifferences (to d.iffer and invent that which differs). contrasts between transparency and opacity, that relegare d.ifferenccs to distinct
(separare) particularities, that restrict thcm to a prefabricated space, that mask the

The urban consolidares. As a form, thc urban transforms what ít brings together '·. polyvalence of ways of living in urban society (modalities and modulations of

(concentrates). It consciously crcates differencc where no awareness of differcnce existed: everyday and habiting), that outlaw the transgression of not"ms that stipulate

what was only distinct, what was once attached ro particula1"ities in rhe fiel d. It consolidares
 As 1 have tried to show, urbanism is a mask anda too!: a mask for the state and political
These negncivc laws in tutn imply a number uf positive laws.
action, a tool of Íntercsts that ate dissimulated within a strategy anda sociologic. Urbanism

1. The urban (urban life, the lifc of urban society) a!ready implies the substitution of do es not ti"y to model space as a work of art. It does not even tty to do so in kccping with

custom for contract. Contract law determines thc frameworks of exchange and of its technological impetatives, as it claims. The space it creates is political.

reciprocity in exchange. This law comes into being in agrarian societies once they
begin tu exchange theit relative surpluses and (once the wotld of commodities is in
place) achieves its highcst expression in logic and languagc. However, use, in the
urban, comprises custom and privileges custom over contraer. The use of urban
objects (this sidewalk, this street, this crosswalk, this light fixturc) is customary, not
contractual, unless we wish to postulatc the existence of a permanent quasi-contract
or pscudocontract for sharing those objects and reducing violcnce toa mínimum.
This does not, howevcr, imply that the contmct system cannot be improved or
transformed.

2. The conception of the urban also stl'ivcs for the reappropriation by human beings of
their conditions in time, in space, and in objects-conditions that werc, and continue
to be, taken away ftom them so that their recoyery will be deferred until after buying
and selling have taken place.

(ls it reasonable to assume that time (the place of values) and space (the medium
of exchange) can be reunited in a higher unity, the urban? Yes, providing we clearly
point out what cveryone alrcady knows: that this unity is a u-tapia, a non-place, a
possiblc-impossible, but uue lhat gives mcaning to the possible, to actinn_ The space
of exchange and the time of values, the space of goods and the supreme good, namely
time, cannot be articulated and go their own way, reflecting the incoherence of so-
called industrial societ)'. Cteating space-time unity would be a possible definition, one
among many, of the urban and urban society.)

3. Politically, this perspective cannot be conceived without extensive self-management

of production and the enterprise within territorial units. A difficult proposition. The
term "politically" is a sourcc of confusion because generalized self-managcment
implies the withering away of the state and the end of politics as such. In this sense,
the incompatibility between the state and the utban is radical in nature. The state
can only prevent the urban ftom taking shape. The state has to control the urban
phenomenon, not to bring it to fruition but to retard its developmcnt, to push it in
the direction of institutions that extend to society as a whole, through exchangc
and the market, the types of organization and management found in the enterprise,
institutions developed during periods of growth, where the emphasis is given to
quantitative (quantifiable) objectives. But the urban can only establish and serve
"habiting" by reversing the state order and the strategy that organizes spacc globally,
through constraint and homogenization, thereby absotbing the subordinate lcvels of
the urban and habiting.
 3 into a universal flood of massive urbani7.ation. 'fhc future of most of human.it"y now lies,
for the first time in history, fundamentally in urbanizing ateas. 'fhe qualities of urban living

CITIES OR in the twenty-first ccntury will define the qualities of civilization itself.

URBANIZATION? But judging superficially by the present statc of the world's citics, fu tute generations will not
find that civilization particularly congenia!. Every city has its share (often increasing and in
sorne instances predominant) of concenttated impoverishment and human hopelessness,
David Harvey of malnourishmcnt and chronic discases, of crumbling or strcsscd out infrastructures, of
senseless and wasteful consumerism, nf ecological degradation and excessive pollution, of
congescion, of seemingly stymied economic and human dcvelopment, and of sometimes
bittcr social suifc, varying from individualized vinlence on the sueets to organized crime
(often an alternativc form of urban governance), through police-state exercises in social
control to massive civic protest movements (sometimes spontaneous) dcmanding political-
economic change. For many, then, to talk of the city of the twenty-lirst century is to conjure
up a dystopian nightmarc in which all that is judged worst in thc fatally flawed charactcr of
humanity cnllects together in sorne hellhole of despair.

In sorne of the advanced capitalist counuies, that dystopian vision has been strongly
associated with the long-cultivated habit on the pan of those with power and privilege
of running as far from the city ccntcrs as possible. Fuclcd by a permissive car cullurc, thc
urge to gct sorne mnney and get out has taken command. Liverpool's population fell by
40 percent bctween 1961 and 1991, for example, and Baltimore City's fell from el ose to a
The ~vaywe see ~u~ cities affects the policies and actions wc undertake. Js 011 r wny of seeing mili ion to under 700,000 in thc same three decades. But thc upshot has beco not only to
domtnated and linuted by an obsession with "the city" hi h · · create cndless suburbanizatinn, so-called edge cities, and spmwling megalopoli, but also to
. . as a t ng, one t at margmalizes our
sense of urbaruzatJ.on as a process? What is the nature of an undcrstanding of urbanization make every village and every ruta! J"etreat in thc advanced capitalist world patt of a complex
that can contribute to emancipatory politics?
web of mbanization that defies any simple categorization of populations into "urban" and
"rural" in that sense that once upon a time could reasonahly be accorded tn those terms.
At the ~eginning of this century, thcre were no more than a dozen or so citics in the
world wtth more than a million pe pt Th ll ·
o e. ey were a m the adv&nced capitalist countrics The hcmorrhaging of wealth, population and power from central citics has left many of
and London, by far the largcst of them al!, had t'ust under seven million A• •h b · · thcm languishing in limbo. Needy populations have be en left behind as the rich and influen-
. . , , e egmnmg
of this ~entury, too, no more than 7 percent of the world's population could reasonably cia! have moved out. Add to this thc devastating loss of jobs ú)aJ"ticularly in manufacturing)
be classJfied as "urban" B th 2000 h
· Y e year , t ere may well be as many as 500 cíties with in recent years and the parlous state of the older cities beco mes all too clear. Nearly 250,000
mor~ than a milli~n i~habitants, while the largest of them, 'fokyo, Siio Paulo, Bombay and manufacturing jobs have been lost in Manchester in two decades while 40,000 disappeared
posstbly Shanghru, wlll boast populations of more than 20 million ,_,.,·1¡o¿ b f from Sheflield's stcel industry alone in just three short catastrophic years in the mid 1980s.
.. . ,, " yascoreo
croes, mostly m the so-called developing countries with upwards of 10 mil. ¡1· S · Baltimore likcwise lost nearly 200,000 manufachuing jobs from the late 1960s nnwm-ds,
. , on. ame nme
early 10 the twenty-first century, if present trends continue, more than half of the world'· and there is hardly a single city in the Unitcd Statcs that has not been the scene of similar
5
population will be dassified as urban rathe1· than ruraL devastation through deindustrialization.

'fhe twentieth centW"y has be th •'· ·

en, en, tmr century of urbaruzation. Befare 1800, the si7.e
~n~ numbers of urban concentrations in all social formations seem to have been stríctly
linuted. 'fhe nineteenth century · Jh b ~•~ ¡ ~•~ · ·
. saw e reau, o umse barrters m a few advanced capitalist
countnes, but the latter half of the twentieth century has se en that Jocalized brea eh turned
The subsequent tmin of cvcnts has been tragic for many. Communities built to scrvicc
now defunct manufactming industries have been left high and dry, wracked with long-
term structural unemployment. Discnchantment, dropping out, and quasi-legal means to
make ends meet follow. 'fhose in power rush to blame the victims, thc police powers
 move in (oftcn insensitively) and the político-media complex has a field day stigmatizing
and stereotyping an underdass of idle wrongdoers, irresponsible single parents and
feddess fathers, debasement of family values, welfare junkies, and much worse. If those
marginalized happen to be an ethnic or racially marked minority, as is all too often the
case, then the stigmatization amounts to barely conccaled racial bigotry. The only racional
response on thc part of those left marginalized is urban ragt, making the actual statc of
social and, even mort emphatically, race telations (for all the campus rhetoric on política!
correctness) far worsc now than it has been for sevcral decades.
But is this a universal tale of urban woc l tell? Or is it something rather more confintd to
the sptcific legacics of old-style capitalist industrialization and the cultural predilections of
the anti-urban Anglo-Saxon way of life? Central cities throughout continental Europe are,
for example, undergoing a singular reviva!. 1\nd such a trend is not mtrely confined toa few
ctnters, líke París with its longstanding process of embourgeoiscment accelctated by all the
grands projets for which the French are justly famous. From Barcelona to Hamburg to Turin
to Lillt, the flow of population and affluence back into tht city centers is marked. But, on
inspection, all this really signifies is that the same problematic divisions gtt geographically
reversed. lt is the periphery that is hurting, and thc soulless banlieu of París and Lyon that
have become thc centers of riot and disaffection, of racial discrimination and harassment,
of deindustrialization and social decay. And if we look more closdy at what has beco
happening in the Anglo-Saxon world, the evidence suggests a dissolution of that simple
"doughout" urban form of inner city decay surrounded by suburban affluencc (made so
much of in the late 1960s), and its teplacement by a complex checktrboard of segregated
and protected wealth in an urban soup of equally segregated impovcrishment ancl decay.
The unjustly infamous "outet estates" of Glasgow are interspcrsed with afAuent commuter
suburbs and the now emerging socioeconomic problcms of the inner suburbs in many US
cities have forced thc wealthy seeking secmity cither furthtr out (thc urbanization of the
remotest countryside then follows) or into segregated and often highly protccted zones
wherever they can best be set up ...
But all of thcsc problems of thc advanced capitalist wotld pale into insignifi.cance compared
to thc extraordinary dilemmas of developing countries, with the wildly uncontrolled pace of
urbanization in Siio Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, Bombay, Calcutta and now Shanghai
and Beijing. On the smface, there seems to be something different going on here, evcn
more than just that qualitative shift that comes with the quantitative rapidity and mass of
urban growth that has Mexico City or Siio Paulo experiencing in just one generation what
London went through in ten and Chicago in thrte.
Air pollution and localized environmental problems, for example, assumt a fu more chtonic
character in developing country cities than they ever did even at the most appalling states
of threats to public health in the nineteenth-ccntury dties of Europe and North America.
Experts believe that "the present situation in Third World large cities is quite different
from the one expetienced in the course of fa~t urbanization in Europe and tht United
1
States" and 1 am inclined to bow to that opinion. But l do so with an important cavcat: it
¡8 vital for us to understand how, why and in what ways these differcnccs havc arisen. I'or
it is, 1 believe, only in such terms that we will better understand the prospects of urban
living in thc t\venty-fitst century in both the advanced capitalist and the developing world.
Sachs is absolutely right, of coursc, to maintain that "the only progressive intcrpretation of
historical expericnce is to consider past experiences as anti-models that can be surpassed." 2
But surpassing is nota matter of simple invcrsion or antidote. It is a matter of dealing
with the complex passages from the forces that construct futurc possibilities and thus
make the city, as always, a figurt of utopian desire and excittment at the same timt as wc
understand the dystopian complcment to the wealth of ncw possibilities that such social
processes creatc.
Cities Limited and Unlimited
We can best get sorne son of purchase on these 4uestions by rcturning to thc historical-
geographical issue of how cities did or did not grow in the past. What, for example, were
the constraints to urban growth that kcpt citics so limitcd in SÍ7e and numbet in the past,
and what happentd sometime before and after 1800 that released urbanization from those
limitations?
The answer is relatively simply in its basics. Up until the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries,
urbanizarían was limitcd by a very spccific mctabolic relation bet\vten citits and their
productive hintedands coupled with the surplus extraction possibilítics (groundcd in
specific dass relations) that oustained them. No matter that certain towns and cities \vere
centers of long-distancc tradc in luxurics or that evcn some basic goods, like gtains, salt,
hidts and timber could be moved over long distances, the basic provisioning (fceding,
watering and enei"gy supply) of the city was always limirtd by the restricted productive
capacity of a relatively confincd hinterland. Cities werc forced to be "sustainable," to use
a cutrently much-favmed wmd, becaust they had to be. The recycling of city nightsoils
and other urban wastes into the hinterland was a majar element in that sustainable pattem
of urbanb:ation, making medieval cities seem somewhat of a virtuous bioregionalist form
.·, of organization for many contemporary ecologists (though what now looks Yirtuous must
smclled putrid at the timc-"thc worsc a city smelled," notes (~uillermt, "tht richtr
3
ü w"''),. From time to time, the hinterlands of cities were extended by forcecl tradc and
"''"'lu''" (one thinks of Nonh African wheat supply to imperial Rome), and of comse
lo.ooli"d productivity gains in agriculture or forestry (somctimes a short-tun phenomenon
!asted until such time as soil exhaustion stt in), and the variable social capacity to
surpluses from a rcluctant rural population typically madt the constraints on urban
elastic rathcr than rigid. But the security of the cit}' cconomy depended crucially
the qualitics of its locali~ed metabolic suppon systtm, in which local environmental
(the breeding grounds of pestilences, plagues and diseases of all sorts that
periodically decimated urban populations) as well as food, water and energy supply-
particularly firewood-figured large. It is worth remembcring in this tegard, that in 1830
most of thc supply of fresh dairy products and vegetables to a city likc Paris came from
within a relatively restricted suburban zone if not from within thc city confines itself. Befo re
1800, the "footptint" (again to use a cuttcntly favored term) of urbanization on the surface
of the earth was relatively light (for all the significance cities may have had in the history
of politics, science, and civilization): cities trod rclatively lightly on the ecosystems that
sustained them and were bioregionally defined.
What changed all this, of coursc, was the wave of new technologics (understood as both
hardware and the software of organizational forms) generated by the military-industrial
complex of early capitalism. Fot reasons that I have elsewhere claborated on at length,
capitalism as a mode of production has nccessarily targetcd the breaking clown of spatial
barriers and the accelcration of turnovrt' time as fundamental to its agenda of relcntless
capital accumulation. 4 The overcoming of spatial barriers and the restraints of particularity
of location thmugh the production of a particular space of transport and communications
(and the consequent "annihilation of space through time" to use Manc's felicitous phrasc)
has been of enotmous significance within the historical dynamic of capitalism, tuming that
dynamic into a very gcogtaphical affair. Many, if not all, of thc majorwaves of innovation
that have shaped the world since the sixteenth century have been built around revolutions
in transpon aml communications: the canals, bridges and turnpikes of the carly nineteenth
century; the railioad, steamboat and telegraph of the mid nincteenth century; the mass
t:rnnsit systems of thf' btf' nint>tccnl-h century; the automobile, the radio and telephnne of
thc early twentieth century; the jet aircraft and television of the 1950s and 1960s; and most
recently, the revolution in telecommunications. Each bundle of innovations has allowed
a radical shift in the way that spacc is organized, and therefore opencd up tadically new
possibilities for thc urban process. Breaking with the dependency upon relatively confined
bioregions opened up totally new vistas of possibilities for urban growth. Cwnon's study
of Chicago, Nature's lvietropolis, tells in this regard an cxemplary tale of how the rapid
urbani?.ation of that city in the nineteenth ccntury was precisely geared to the human
realization of -these new possibilities with -the effect that the footprint of the city actoss the
whole of thc American Midwest and Wcst became ever larger as its metabolic-ecological
relations changed arid as it itself grew in a few years into onc of the largest cities in the
world. And intemally, as Platt so btilliantly shows in bis Chicago-bascd study of The E!ectric
5 information, making the microchip as important as the satellite in unclcrstanding the
City, the progress of electrification allowed the construction of radically new and dispersed
urban forms. 6
Each round of innovation breaking the barriets of space and time has providcd new
possibilities. The steam engine, to take just one highly signifi.cant historical example, liberated
the energy supply of cities from relatively inefficient and highly localized constraints, at the
same time as it frced local hinterlands from a chtonic conflict ovet whether to use the land
for food or firewood (contcmpomry students now find it very odd, for example, that one
of the closcr rings of production with which von Thünen surroundcd bis city in Tbe Isolated
State of the early ninetcenth century is given over to forestty). 7 But thc stcam engine could
only accomplish its revolutionary role to the degree that it was in turn applied to a fi.eld of
transport and communications: the coal had to be shunted aroun_J. ltwas and is, thercfore,
the total bundle of innovations and thc synergism that binds them together that is really
crucial in opening up new possibilities.
And in this, scerningly quite small things can figure large in what created possibilities fot
city growth. Thc military engineers and mathematicians of thc cighteenth century, for
examplc, in using water flow as a form of fortification learned that networks were far
more efficient in moving water than Jirect pipes and channels; this recognition (and thc
\ study of the mathematics of networks that wcnt with it) had immense significancc once
~ .. it was applicd to citics in the ninetccnth century: a given head of water flowing down (me
p;po "'" provision no more than 5,000 people but that samc head of water when flowcd
around a netvmrk can provision twemy times that. This is a useful general metaphor for
'_ :urban growth possibilitics: the development of an intettelated nctwork of cities drawing
·. upon a variety of hinterlands permits an aggregate urban growth process mdically grcater
than that achievablc for each in isolation.
the mid-1960s, to take another cxample of a phase in which innumerable innovations
'(ü.ch>d;ng the neccssary mathematical knowledges) have bundled togcther to create a
synergism of urbanizing possibilities, wc have witnessed a reorganization in spatial
and urban forms under conditions of yet anothet in tense round in the
"dluocic'n of spatial barriers and speedup in turnovcr time. Thc "global village" of which
M''"'"ll McLuhan speculatively wl'Ote in the 1960s has become, at least in some senscs, a
McLuhan thought that tdcYision would be tht vehicle, but in tJ'uth it was probably
launching of Sputnik that presaged the break, ushcring in as it did a new agt of satellitc
. But, as in other ateas, it is less a singlt innovation than the total bundle
Containerization, jet-cargo systems, roll-on-mll-off ferries, truck Jesign and,
as important, highway design to support grcater weights, have all helped to reduce
cost and time of moving goods over space, while automatic information processing,
and control systems, satellite communication, celluht phoncs and computer
ohcwlog;c., all facilitare the almost instantancous communication, collation and analysis
that now shape urban life.
new tcchnological and organizational possibilities have all been procluced under
of a capitalist mode of ptoduction with its hcgcmonic military-industrial-
interests. For this reason, 1 believe it is not only useful to think of but also
to recognize that we ru:e all embtoiled in a global process ,Y capitalist urbanization
 (the other bcing local, nacional and multinacional capitals)-have radically tüffcrent needs
even in those countties that have nominally at least sought a non-capitalistic path of
as wcll as radically diffetent ways to explore the possibilities of cxploiting the web of
development and a non-capitalistic urban form. The manner and particular style of
urbanizacion for purposes of capital accumulation. Tensions arise between the faccions
urbanization varies grcatl.y, of course, depending upon how these capitalist possibilities are
beeause they eaeh have quite different capabilities foJ" and .interest in geographical
proposed, opposed and ultimately realized. But the context of possibilities is very definitely
movement, varying from the relatively fixed-in-space capital of property, landed and "local"
a capitalist production. And the sense of new possibilities continually opening up gives rise
small-scale capital and the instantaneous capadties fot movement of transnacional finance.
to that modernist style of U tapian tlúnking about technopoles, multifunctionopolises, and
Much of the crea ti ve destruccion we are now witnessing wíthin the urban process has to be
the like, which parallels that dystopian imagery about the dty 1 began by invoking.
understood in terms of such interna! contradictions within the dynamícs of overall capital
accumulacion. But the other part of it comes from the ino:easingly ruinous ¡:;ompetition
There are, it scems to me, two basic perspectives from which now to view the conflicting
between places (be they nation states, regions, cities or cven smaller local jurisdictions)
ways such possibilities ate being taken up. Pirstly, we can look upon urbanization (and the
as they find themselves forced to sell themselves at the lowest cost to lure highly mobile
lures of city construction and destruction) in terms of the forces of capital accumulation.
capital to eatth.
Capital reali:>:es its own agenda of "accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for
production's sake," against a background of the technological possibilities it has itself
>AIIter•na11iv·e Urbanization
created. Urbanization in the advanced capitalist countries, for cxamplc, has not in recent
history been about sustaining bioregions, ecological complcxes, or anything other than
tbe other perspective from which tu vie\v tbe rccent history of utbanization is in terms
sustaining the accumulation of capital. popular (íf not "populist") scizurc of the possibilicics that capitalist technologies have
To sorne degree, rhis is about tbe vast historical migrations of labor in response to
In the United States, to take the paradigmatic case, capital accumulation tbrough
, ftom one region to anothcr if not from one continent to anothcr. That formulacion
suburbanization and all that tlús entailed (from thc vast associated water projccts of thc
made most scnse in tbe ninetcenth and even the early twencieth centuries (though
American West, tbe highway systems, the construction complexes, to say nothing about the
m< wm always ex:ceptions sueh as the flood of Irish overseas in the wake of the patato
automobile, the oil and rubber industries, etc.) was central to tbe postwar econorn.ic success
which may have been prompted by conditions of imposed agrarian capitalism
of the United States, evcn though it produced its nethet side in tbe form of derelict and
bardly a "normal" migmtion of rural population in search of urban libcrties and
deserted central cicles. The point to emphasil:e here i:, not so much the technologic~l mix
labor). But the flood of people into developing country cities is not fundamentally
but the active realizacion of opportunicies for direct capital accumulacion by way of tbat
.. lo the pulls of employment attached to capital accumulation, or evento the pushes of
technological complcx of possibilicies. The exhauscion of these possibilities (for example,
agrarian capitalism destruccive of tradicional peasantries (though thcre are
thc relativc saturation of the market for new automobiles) makes capital aceumulacion more
¡yee¡;mon" <ofcl" world where that process is very sttongly in evidence). It is a far more
difficult, as evety large multinacional auto pmducel" now rccognizes.
search to take advantage of capitalist pmduced possibilities no matteJ· whether
accumulation is going on or not, and often in the face of economic conditions that
Tbe auto industry now looks, therefore, upon those unsaturated markets in China, India,
if not more appalling than, those left bebind. And, wbilc one of the effects may
Latín America, and thc deliberately "under-urbanized" wodd of the former Soviet bloc
vast "informal economies" that operate both as ptotocapitalist sectoJ"s and as
as its primary realm of future accumulacion. But that means reshaping the ut·ban process
grounds for more convencional forms of capitalist exploitation and accumulation,
in those regions to the not parcicularly environmentally friendly (or even economically
of the movemcnt in itself can bardly be attributed to the machinations of
feasiblc) system that for severa! decades supported economic growth in the United States.
While that prospect may send shivers clown every mildly ecologically conscious spine, any
"''"""'d capitalist class accion. 8

inability to pursuc it will produce even worse jrissons of horror in the boardrooms of every
ntiou;ngflow of Asian and African populations into European countries and the
transnational automobile company, if not the whole capitalist class.
Latino flows intu North America exhibit similar qualities producing sorne
instruccive contrasts right in the heart of capitalist citics. \Vithin earshot of
The particular dialeccic of attraccion and repulsion that capital accumulation exhibíts for
in London, for example, onc finds tht ex:traordinary power of international
different sítes within the web of urbanization varíes spatio-temporally as wcll as with
moving funds almost instantaneously round the wotld chtek by jowl with
the ficcion of capital concerned. Financia! (money) capital, merchant capital, industrial-
Bengalí population Oargely unemployed in any convencional sense), which
manufactuting capital, property and landed capital, statist capital, and agro-business
migratory bridge into the heart of capitalist soeiety in search of nc\v
capital-to takc the most familiar faetional breakdown of the capitalist class configuration
possibilities in spite of rampant racism and increasingly low wage, informal ami temporary
working possibilities. Here, too, the industrial reserve army that su eh migtatory movements
create may become an active vehicle for capital accumulation by lowering wages but thc
migratory movement itself, while it may indecd have been initiated by capitallooking for
labor reserves (as with guest workets and migrant streams ftom the European periphery),
has surely taken on a life of its own.
The massive forced and unforced migrations of peoples now taking place in the world,
a movement that seems unstoppable no matter how hard countt'Íes strive to enact
stringent immigration controls, will have as much if not greater significance in shaping
urbanization in the twenty-first century as the powerful dynamic of unrestrained capital
mobility and accumulation. And the politics that flow from such migratory movements,
while not necessarily antagonistic to continued capital accumulation, are not necessarily
consistent with it either, posing sel'Íous questions as to whether urbanization by capital
accumulation will be anywherc near as hegemonic in thc future as it has been in the
past, even in the abscnce of any major organizing force, such as a powcrful socialist
or pan-religious . . movcment, that seeks to counteract the manifest injustices and
marginalizations of the capitalist fotm of urbanization by the construction of sorne
alternative urban world.
An Adequate Language
Rut in all nf this 1 am struck again and again by the difficulty of designing an adequate
language, an adequate conceptual apparatus to grasp the naturc of the problem we seem
to be faced with. I worry that last year's conceph1al tools and goals will be used lo fight
next ycat's issues in a dynamic situation that more and more requires proactive rather than
remedia! action. 1 am not alone in this wotty. Nor is this an entirely new dilemma. As Sachs
observes of urban politics and policies in thc past:
Urbanists, like economists and generals, werc ready for the last battlc they won
the socialrhetoric of the charter of Athens served mote as a screen to hidc their
fascination with new building materials, industrializcd construction methods, and
spatial and atchitectu.ral aesthcticism rather than as a pointer to look at the real
person in the streets... In their conceptions of society and human needs, most
postwar urbanists demonstrated the samc mix of naivcté, dogmatism, and lack of
interest in cmpirical evidence about people's lifestyles as the protagonist of the
discussions held in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s.~
Are we, then, in dangcr of repeating the error that Keynes long ago pointed to when he
remarked on how we have a strong penchant for organizing out present livcs in accordance
with thc defunct vision of sorne long dcad economist?
In thinking thmugh this problem, 1 think it important first to recognize that, as a physical
artifact, the contempomry city has many layers. It forms what we might call a palimpsest,
a composite landscape made up of different built forms superimposcd upon cach other
with the passing of time. In sorne cases, thc earliest layers are of truly ancient origin,
rooted in the oldest civilizations whose imprints can be discerned beneath today's urban
fabric. But even cities of relatively recent date comprise distinctivc laycrs accumulated at
different phases in the hurly burly of chaotic urban growth engendered by indusuialization,
colonial conquest, ncocolonial domination, wave after wave of migration, as well as of real
estate speculation and modctnization. Think, for example, of how the migratoty layers that
occupy even the rapidly expanding shantytowns of citics in developing countries quickly
spawn identifiable physicallayers of more and more permanent and salid occupancy.
In thc last two hundred years or so, the layers in most cities havc accumulated ever thickcr
and faster in rclation to burgeoning population gwwth, massive voluntary and forced
relocations of populations, strong but contradictory paths of cconomic development, and
powerful technological changes that libetated urban growth from formcr constraints.
it is ncvertheless, as Jencks points out, one of thc oddities of cities that they become
and mote fixed with time, more and more sderotic, precisely bccausc of the way they
ifrmmcn"U.y add things on rather than totally shcdding their skins and beginning aH o ver
·~un.'"PLm•"'"· architects, urban designers-"urbanists," in shon-all face one common
•p<ob•l"n>: how to plan the consttuction of the next layers in the urban palimpscst in ways
match future wants and needs without doing too much violence to all that has gone
. \XIhat has gone before is important precisely becausc it is the locus of collective
nemc,y, of political idcntity, and of powerful symbolic meanings at the same time as il
•on•titu1>c. a bundle of resources constituting possibilitics as well as baniers in the built
nvttc>mncot· fot creative social change. There is never now a fabula rasa upon which new
forms can be frccly constructed. But the general charge of searching for a future
respecting the past aH too frequently internalizcs the scletotic tendencies in urban
into even more sclerotic ways of thinking .
• • •
e ''•himl'wc calla "city" is the outcomc of a "process" that we call "urbanization." But
~!•mining thc relationship between processes and things, thcre is a prior episremological
im!lo,Io¡licru ¡pn>blcm of whcther we prioriti7.e the process or the thing and whether or
even possible to separate the process from thc things embodied in it.
I shall adopt in what follows is largcly govetned by a dialectical way of thinking
(a) ptocesses are regarded as in some ways more fundamental than things, and
are always mediated through the thing~ they produce, sustain and dissolve.
1 would suggest, the first point of a radical break that must be made with late
""h-'"'"""Y thinking. For at that time, the predominant conclusion, in spite of all
 the emphasis upon social relations and processes, wa~ that thc city was a thing that could
temporal and metabolic constraints that permittcJ aggregate populations to grow at the
be engineered successfully in such a way as tu control, contain, modity or enhance social
fast rates they recently have. Had thc metabolic baniers to urbanization that prevailed in
processes, Olmstead, Geddes, Howard, Burnham, Sitte, Wagner, Unwin, all steadily reduced
the past continueJ to hold, then population growth would most cettainly have bcen of
the problem of intricate social processes to a matter of finding the right spatial form. And
an entirely different surt and order. To put it this way sounds, however, as if 1 am merely
in· this way they set the dominant twentieth-century tone for cithtt a mechanistic approach
reversing the dircction of the causal arrow. But in effect I am arguing that thc production
to urban form, as in the case of J ,e Curbusier, or the more organic appmach of Frank
of spatio-temporalities within social pwcesses is perpetually changing the horizon of social
Lloyd Wright.
possibilities. Shifting spatio-temporal horizuns for social action become as important to
understanding population growth as population growth becomes for under¡;tanding thc
The difficulty with so-called high mudernism and urbanization was not, I submit, its
particular spatiu-ttmpural forms uf contemporary cities. Abovt all, it is then clear why
"totaliúng" vision, but its ptrsistent habit uf privileging things and spatial forms oveJ.· wcial
attempts to engineer social pwcesscs thmugh the imposition of spatial form are doomed
proccsses, and so adopting a metaphysical approach that presumed that social enginceJ.·ing from the very outset .
could be accomplished through thc engineering of physical form. The antidote is not to
abandon all talk of the city as a whole, as is thc ptnchant of postmodernist critique, but
The issue for us is then not gazing into somc misty ctystal hall to make those always J"iskr
to return to the leve! of social proccsses as being fundamental to thc consuuction of the
and usually ettontous prcdictions of what the future will look like, but enlhting in the
things that contain them ..
strugglt to advancc a certain mix of spatio-temporal production processes rather than
others in pursuit of certain interests and goab rather than others. J n more raw political
Urbanb:ation must then be understood not in terms of sorne socio-organizational
terms, this says that the production of spatio-temporalities that define the UJ·ban are the
entity called "tht city" (tht theuretical object that so many gtographers, demogmphers
object of all manner of strugglcs (class, ethnic, racial, gendcr, religious, symbolic, etc.) aml
and sociqlogists erroneuusly pre~ume), but as the production of spccific and quite
that hegemonic powers (from finance capital tu the World Bank) can sccretly impuse their
heterogeneous spatio-temporal forms embcJded within different kinds of social acrion.
agendas by imposing their own particular spatio-tempural orderings. But, though they may
Urbani:-:ation, understood in this manner, is necessarily constitutive of as well as constituted
seem to den y agency to excluded and marginaliztd others, such htgemonic institutions
by social processes. It loses its passive qualities and becomes a dynamic moment in overall
can nevtr entirely control the ptoduction of space and it is, thtreforc, in the interstices of
ptocesses of social diffttentiation 9nd social change. For thosc of us who ha ve abandoned
lack of control that al! sotts of hberatory and emancipatory possihilities can hide .
the Newtonian-Cartesian-Kantian cunception of spatio-tempurality ... , thc production of
space and of spatio-temporality becomes a fundamental moment within social processes,
inseparable as a relacional attribute of it, rather than as something constituttd with absolute
qualities a priori.
the chief sin of the twentiet:h centmy was that mbanintion happened and
much either cared or noticcd in relation LO the other issues of the day judged murt
This is, I recugnizt, a somewhat difficult argument. So Jet me illustrate the importance of
iJnpo<t•m. I1 would be an egregious error to enteJ.· upon thc twenty-first century making the
the idea in very general teJ.·ms. Under the absulute conctption of space anJ time, it would
mistake. It is, funhcrmme, vital lo understand that what half-worked for the 1950s
be perfectly reasonablc to look upun the massive urbanization in the developing wor\d as
not bt adequate for the qualitatiYely diffcrent issues to be fought ovtt thc naturt of
a direct product of, say, population growth. If there are urban problcms, the argument
yili'"ci''" in the twenty-first century. And it is equally vital that the Janguage in which
would then follow, that it i~ the population i~sue that must fitst be resolved. To be sute,
urban problcmatic is embtdded be transformed, if only tu libera te a whole raft of
there may be feedback efftcts as the demographic and reproductive charactedstic~ of urban
""'Plml po,,iC,illliü" that may otherwise rcmain hidden. Imagine, for txample, a woJ·id
pupulations begin to diverge from their rural counterparts. But the basic issue hcre can still
Wi"cl'""co"Hnc out thinking toan absolute conception of space whcre encities called
reasonably be thought of, given the absulute view of space, as one of population growth.
1monn1icioc; endowtd with cau~al powers address the issut uf ecological crisis. This is in
Under the relational view, howevtr, population growth cannot be considered separately
prevalent modt of thought even in "progressive" political cirdes. lt soon leads
at all fmm the organizational and spatio-temporal conditions embeJded in populacion
F"' D•olown ,,,¡¡, "repressivt tribalism and exdusion," citing Edward Goldsmith (editor
dynan:Ucs as a social process. The capacity to produce space anJ to construct entirely new
as saying "a certain number of 'foreignets' would be alluwed to settk" in
forms of spatiu-temporality is necessarily a constitucive moment in processes of population
rn>milry but that "they would not, thereby partake in the running of the community
change rather than a merely passive site for that change. If that is the case, then it is just
time as the citizens elccted them to be of thtir numbcr." 11 Countetpose the
as mtaningful tu argue that it was the libeJ.·ation of urban gmwth from its former spatio-
' that arises out of this framework of thought with the relacional idta that
 spatio-temporalities are heterogeneous and actively produced by multiple social processes
(varying ftom capital accumulation to religious worship, or fwm sexual acts to consttuction
of momlmcnts) and that the "public" ranges across a great (variety of communicative
spha:es wühin and between which all sorts of negotiations and conflicts are possible. Add
in, furthermore, the vision that environmental-ecological transformations (including the
coosttuction of built environments) are potentially justas productive of new environmental
niches and social differentiation as they are productive of the homogeneity of ecological
crises. The range of possibilities that attaches to this sccond mode of thought looks to
me radically diffa:ent-and much more eoticing for the play of all sorts of emancipatory
politics.
Coming to terms with what urbaoliving might be about in the twenty-first century poses,
then, a series of key problems to be simultaneously wmked on with a set of parallel myths
that desa:ve to be exploded:
The jirst nqtb is tbat the problems posed l:J' urbanization are essentialfy a con.requenCIJ of deeper rooted
.rocial processe.r that can and need to be addressed independentfy of their geographical setting or spatio-
tempora/ ordering. This view should be strenuously opposed with a vision that sees the
production of different spatio-temporal ordcrings and structures as active moments within
the social ptocess, the appreciation of which will better reveal how what wc convcntionally
understand by urbanization and urban forms might be reddined and factored in as
moments of transformation, and consequently possible points of intcrvenüon within that
social process.
1'he second myth is that it is merejy a matter qjjinding the right technologie.r to get a be/ter fix on hmP to
accommodate bm;geoningpopulations IPitbin thc urbanJrame. Opposed to this is a recognition that
the new tcchnologies produced by the military-industrial complcx of capitalisrn have again
and again opencd up ncw and bwadly capitalist-oriented possibilities for urbanization,
but that thesc possibilities ought nevertheless to be distinguished from the prcdominant
forces (such as capital accumulation or populist appropriation) that realize their own
agendas.
The tbird myth is tbat coming up 1vith the rcsource.r to cotifront urban problems depends on the p1ior solution
of economic development andpopulation grmvtb problems. Opposed lo this is the idea that cities have
always been fundamentally about wealth creation and wealth consumption, and that getting
things right in cities is the only real path towards economic improvement for the rnass of
the population. And in that, I think we should also include fundamental reddinition~ of
wealth, well-being and values (includiog those that affect population growth) in ways that
are more conducive to the developmcnt of human potentialities as opposed to mere capital
accumulation for the sclected few;
myth is that social problem.r in urbanizing m"l!as are curable onjy to the degree that the
of the nwket are given freer pla;•. Opposed to this is the idea that wealth creation (and
d"oni<i<m;< "''P''"''' on social collaboration, on coopcration (even between businesses),
than on sorne individualized cotnpctitive Darwinian struggle fot existence. The
of social justice is thcrcforc onc important means to achieve improved economic
,¡¡,,,n,ne<C'nd here, at least, communitarian thinking and values do have a potcntially
myth is that community .rolidari!J• can provide the stabi!i!J• and pmver needed to control, manage
alleviate urban problems and that "community" can substitute forpublic polifíes. Opposed to this
;ili"w>g<Utio<< dml "community," insofat as it cxists, is an unstable configutation relative
conflictual processes that generate, sustain and eventt~ally undermine it, and that
. as it do es acquire permanence, it is frequently an exclusionary and oppressivc social
(that becomcs particularly dangerous when romanticiztd), which can be as much
root of urban conflict and urban degtnetation as it can be a panacea for political-
<oncmic difficulties .
sixth Jll)'lh is tbat an)' radical tramfo1711ation in social re!ations inllrbanizing areas mus! mvait some
socialist or CO!IItJI!tni.rt revo/ution that tvi!! then put our cittú in .ru.ffiúentjy good order to allo/IJ tbe
social rdations to ftomish. Opposed to thi~ is the idea that thc transformation of social
in urban settings has tu be a continuous process of socioenvironmcntal change,
lo<<gwmlutfon that should have the construction of an alternativc society as its long-
seventh m)'th i.r tbat strong orrle1; authorit;· t~nd centralized control-be it moral, política!,
luuuH>;it,;n<m, religious, pl:pical or militmistic-mttsl be reasserted over our di.rintcgmting and strife-
withont, hm»ever, inteifen"ng i11 tbe fundamental !iherty of thc market. Opposed to this is
understanding that the contcmporary form of "markct Stalinism" is self-contradictory
the recognition that urbanization has always been about creative forms of opposition,
and conflict (including thosc registered through market exchange). The ttnsions
of' hotc<mgcncf<ty"nnotené should not be rcprcssed, but liberated in socially cxciting
even if this mcans more rathet· than lcss conflict, including contestations over socially
"''""Y socialization of maJ·ket processes for col\ective ends.
eighth l!!)lth is that divem"!J' mtd difference, heterogeneitJ• of values, lift-.rtylc opposition,· and cbaotic
are to befeared as sources r¿f disordcr and that "others" shou!d be kept out to dejend the
plaCIJ. Opposcd to this is the vicw that cities that cannot accommodatc to diversity,
!"\gn<tn<y movements, to new lifestyles and to economic, political, religious and valuc
'"'gcncity will die eithcr through ossification and stagnation or becau~e thcy will fall
in violent conflict. Defi.ning a politics that can bridge the multiplc heterogeneities
repressing differcnce is one uf the biggcst challcngcs of twenty-fi.rst-ccntury
The ninth myth is that cities are anti-ecological Opposing this is the view that high density
utbanized living and inspired forms of urban design are the only paths to a mote
ecologically sensitive form of civilization in the twenty-fu·st centuty. We must recognize
4
that the distinction between environment as commonly understood and the built emritwtment NETWORKS, BORDERS,
is artificial, and that the urban and evcrything that goes into it is as much a part of the
solution as it is a contributing factor to ecological difficulties. The tangible recognition FFERENCES: TOWARDS
that the mass of humanity will be located in living environments designated as urban says
that the cnvitonmental politics must pay as much if not more attention to the qualities of THEORY OF THE URBAN
those built and social environments as it now typically does to a fictitiously separated and
imagined "natural" environment. Schrnid
It will take imagination and poli tical guts, a surge of revolutionary fervor and revolutionary
change (in thinking as well as in politics) to address these questions adequately. In this
regard, at least, there is much to learn fmm our predecessors for thcir political and
intellcctual colll'age cannot be doubted. But if the rhetoric about handing on a decent
living environment to future generations is to have even one iota of meaning, a tadically
diffcrent collective thought process of sorne sort has to be instituted. A crucial preliminary
is to find an adequate language in which to discuss possible futures in a tapidly urbanizing
wotld, a languagc that actively recognizes that urbanization is both constitutive of, as well
as constituted by, the ways such possibilities might potentially be grasped.

Notes
process of urbanization has changed fundamentally in J"ecent years. For more than
S•ch,, "Vulnctabtl!!y ol G-,.nl Unes ond !11< 1.1le l.ntcery,' Tbe
Mellopolir Ew: Vo/1//IJe 1, A Wor/J o/ (,'uml Ci!m, ods. /.-Jatc<'i Du¡¡oc• le<>ulm·y, the dominant form of urbanization was concentric, with suburbs arranged
andJohn D. KaSAnln (Nowbury: Sagc, 1988) 3•fl.
2 !bid. belts around an urban core. This is how the large agglomemtions of the hNentieth
3 André Gmllermc, Tbe A.~c v( TP"alfl. thc Ud~n11 Ei!I)/!"OiiiiN!II i11 t!Je
emerged. Atound the end of the century, however, urban growth patterns Legan
i\'m·r!J of Fm11ce (College Sinlion: Texos A & ~~ Un"'e!"SLty l'1c",
l9H8)171. as manifested in a wide variety of places: the process of urbanization has
4 David 1 !at~·ey, TIN IJ¡¡¡¡/r lo CapiM (Oxford: Bhckwdl, 1982); David
/!:"ve¡·, Thf Co11Jitioll '!/ Posll!lodemil)" (Oxfurd: Blackwdl, 1989); com1; undi"w;d· existing urban forms aJ"e beginning to dissolve; centrality is becoming
nml David Ha1VC)", Tbe ll!ba~~ E.,¡'>fdem"(Bnltimote:Johns Hopk111>
>ly<no,phoue;; and eccentric urban configurations are evolving. Overarching, polycentric
llniVI'tsity Pn:;s, 1989).
5 William Cwnun, Natmú ;\lflmpolir·C/;ie>Jgn o11J ti" Cmtl li?eJI (Ncw regions are taking shape. Extremely heterogeneous in structure, they include old
York: Notton, 1991)
6 1-lawld J.. "Phlt, "!"/~ Elertác Ctty: E11".IO' a11d G!o!Pib "( ¡/;, CNr,¡ga as well as once-peripheral areas.
Arca, 188r!-19JU {Chkago: Chicng<1 Unive1>1l) P!e>S, 1991).
7 Johnn Hcinrich von Thünen, T!Jc !JOklt"l Jhllt, lran>. Cada \-1.
Wa1tonberg {Oxfonlanil New York, l'e1·gnmnn Preso, 19M). process, new urban configurations are constantly evolving. Lightly settled,
8 Scc Alejandro P<>tles, Manuel Ca"dl,, and Laurcn A. Bcnton,
Tbe l!!{orlllrd h'fi!IOIIIJ." St!!dics iJJ Ad1;wccd mid Lm De1doped Coiilllliet rural areas are caught up in various forms of "peri-urbanization." Urbanists have
(Baliunore: Jnhm Hopkim llnivcl>ity Pte», \989).
a number of terms to describe the new forms of centrality that are emerging in
9 S•chs, "Vuhmability of G1anl CLI!es •nJ lhe Life Lollery," 343.
10 Choilo•Joncb, I-itlt11Jf'OIÍJ: I_;;J A11gc/<J, 11M Nml.<, mu/1/Jt.\'lr>mgcllMII!J' areas: "edge city," "technoburb" or "in-between cities." 1 Howevcr,
rf [Jet,roAn-!Jiltd/11'' (J.onc1on: Academy fi<htJOLlS, 199.1).
11 Andtew DoLson, (;m¡¡ Polil!cal Tbtmght (LDndon: H01pci Collino, terms, and the concepts behind them, are no more than generalizations
l990) 96.
ec<ocuhu special cases. A general description of the new form of urbanb:ation led
Soja to coin the term "exopolis." By that, he refers to the improbable city orbiting
the old agglomeration cores that turns the metropolis inside-out and outside-in
time, and has a gravitational center as empty as a "doughnut"-that is, those
outside of the center, right on the edge, but still in the middle of things.
 ~
in the urbanizatJOn of tbl: \HHILL In iLs· r e'IJ' ' rt ' "Tl lt .>tatt ,,¡- rhc \\,,t-:d·,
- 1 ¡¡¡,-,_-·

Unitcd Nations HABlTAT office made a formaliJUmlJuncemcc•c' •l•cc

· •· '":- he
10
'1>1 1111

the majority of thc world's populatirm-ne·¡rh-

' - ··- ¡ - ·
'\ ) hillion -1\el!tn\lrl~ll
1 1,~;'-'.-'''llc'l _,, 11 ,

THE URBANIZATION OF rather than in ruml arcas. This urban-ruraltippinL:-I)"ÍPl

of a much more exrensÍYe '
- •

focused
- ' h ')\\c;\L''

·tnd
'
- -
·Kcel·r-
' r
e ,\lll:C: ut-1 xtlll!<lll<lll
- · pn>cc·"
i ' ll-•1 ••llc

Lu
1r.

.l _,
l.l'L

,,,, 1

l'.a' e •JI , l'c",ll··

THEWORLD ,preading over the en tire Earrlú surb.ce for • k-,,
1r '-''· ·1•.
• •C

~"
urbani7.ation of the world ha.; bumnhr ,-,•1
" ' 1 1•. !le:\\ . tern- t" dc·,cril,., ,1 ~, 11 ·.el o
Edwmd W. Sojo cmd .L Miqud l<cr,1oi cc•m•c<Cti•oc'llly,' called cities and mnropoliuUl n:p:i<>Il'·. Tlw 1, ... 111 .. ,._-,,u], 11 _ . el

in thc 1960s to reflect the increaSJlll!,, ,..,"'li ' hd

' ¡¡,-rl llclllL'
, . . <Jil ·
ur:J:\:1 li(, :!1

Liwoifi'"'nlly by the work of Sa>ki;¡ Sas~~n 1--h- 1ll'-JIIc, ,[1L'C<>I'Cc,O["t

· in tlw <;·''. ¡ · lhc···.C'.,,j 1;,

to be widely u~ed for the most influennallinanci:l~ Cll:ll:ll.\llu l'C""ll. •i 1 he 1 '

CO•n<>my. More recentl)·, rhe IYorld\ hrge:;r ;¡g-glomer.ni• Hl' h:ll ,. t:.kc-1 • 1-1 •c~ci.Li Jc'lll•
Thc term \\"t \\·illuse most lJI."·"c' ' '~ "'>.; l'' 1J:ll c't ._- :·,-.:1• ,-~--- .. , lllh,
•• ' ,-,- rl•

metropolitan fon11 characreri;ed h1· 'l)l'a\\"lm,

' ,l';j''i\Cc:l~•l.Cllcl.
1 . . . 1 ":·;"
1 1_.1

around one or more "historie" urblll ~n.lLé. ll-,)J.Illli.l"

...
1
' L ,·:11:'' 1' 1•

.
regtons " o f mono rhan one 1mllitmmhahir:mt• :hcll c.,, 1111 :.l• '1
lll
"'
'·'omcococci<mre~gJOns,
"cm<ogoccily · " \\"lOS~
1 popnblion,·xccnls )lln•illll•T ,w ]¡, ','ll
;.e· thatw~ tentann:h- call" 11 :n::Llull•l.lr.u,
-' Lec-....• •1'.'. . \• h l 11 '
th<;<d<omo;,c·,pl<ic and econ!lllliC m;u?ni
·' ' 1--,·11
[l.ldl-s ·,•, ' . · , ,. 1,, · '1 l "L llillc 1 11 ,

. global imprint of thcoct regirm:1l agglumc:r:1-¡, 1p, .m el r _1c 1 -- ., , --., ·.1

illustrated in the satdlitc l)icturl- ,¡el'·" -- .." ,,,·l,l ,)< lll_l(hl - 1'.111•
Over the past 30 yc;ars, the \vorlct has been expniencing an unusually e>pansive and
over 500 nry-regi1m-; 111 rhe mdlirJ:l jl.ll' L tic" ;•'1"\ .1 il,. 'll•
rccon!lgured form of urbanintion that has delined a distinctively global urban age----<Jne
iocucf '""' léocth';. snrfacc, but thn· l"'liKc:nrrntv ,n·ll, "·e--· .l ,1¡_ 1. _1 ·-1•
in which wc can speak of both the utbanizanon of the cmirt globe and the globalization
sh'lrc l>f ·1·
' , account for an even ,_,<rreater ' .11. .1
l<L\I<lllOJL.IIcl"\11\>llTI.Ill ..
of urbanism as a way of life. This drnamic interrclationship bet>vctn the Ui·ban and the
cteativity and polirical ¡1 m 1·et. · 1·¡1 '-''" llll ll l<lll]'.ll' Ll[\-lc,'l•''i•
global is tbt focm of this cssay, wbich presents an ovnvie·w of the urbanization of the
wodcl understood as the cxtension in the spatial reach of ciry-bascd socicties, economies
and cultures to e\'try place on thc planct. \Ve see this extended form of n•ntcrrcp>><''Y
urbanization not justas an adjunct to thc globalizanon process, bnt also as its pc·in;,t-y
vivid picturc of thc accdcratin\c. •.•. ,.,,... , 1•'
' ,., 1lle 1' 1 l"'ll·,·o li,-
,,
11
drivíng force;, sümulating innoYation, crc;alivity and cconomic growth while at thc same
.·, is ptesented. in the ,;ene\ ot'mall' 1, 1 1.,,,-..,,,.,. 1,. 1~l \1 1 ',1 ·''
time intensifying social ami econmnic incqualitics and confiict filled polincal
cities-London and BcijinL;-ilH: h·.Jd :n<n: lh.tn 1 1'11 11• 1 11 •11
But as the wodd utbanizcs, cities are being globali:ttd. Not only is urbanization incr<O'tLingl
century, lOO \·c:us later thar ll't hacl cc..[l.ll"•cl,.,l 1 ,,

reaching ever¡'\vhcre, everywbtrc is increasingly reaching inro the c1ty, contributing to

was beginning ro ohm,- tlH: ,;:_c;n' ur· mc¿lCJ·_ re,;_, •11,11
major reconfi.guration of the social and ~patial structures of urbanism and crcating the
as abovc the 10 1111·11·l<Jll mar-k -:1nd1Ull'c:
· . · 1. 11.,_.;,. 1. , 1.,
cconornically and culturally hetewgcneous cities the world has evcr known.
•J\ ,\
'"
York and Tokyo had acrualh- ,m-¡la,,cu r'l.ll IIIL'h•·.J. 1-11'' "1,

with n world oriL·ntui<m

• 1,L·r,· p," .. ,, • \l ' " '.( •1\ :-- .1 '~ 1 '-

The Urbanization of the World Rhtin-Rulu-area--ail\l"lfhpopuLlllllll• ,,¡· ,,,.,., 11 , 111 ,

the numbet 0 f 1111 ¡¡-Hm-plus lllelf<'Jl''li1.:11 rc,l':llnl' '-l.llc,: 1, .. 1, :l•
Therc can be no doubt that more people are living in cities than e\·er bcforc. Just
regions expanded LO 29. TI le 1
ur)alli/.~'r:<'n ,,r-thc· 1\'•>rl" ·1·,,-- ._ ,,,-
many is not easy to determine, because countries cliffer on the ctitcria uscd to
is urban. It is now widely accepted, however, that 2006 matkcd a temarkable
 ' ' '

lf-'"J'"
,.,,_, ,,,,.,,,
(l,coco
<cllcu:Co
Ow«• Koo.

1900
1B25

'"""' ló P· ,-l,lp•o

1/ ""''''" ''""-

lo<"
NON h"-''·"

""'''"''
'"""f"
B<~'c; o
o~,lo-Koloc
2013 M,c'l"'l~onl•_,

1950

11 "'' ,,
12 '"'"

Cily reg1ons of 1 milil<.ln people or ~·.me rnell>pi,Ad

10.1 Accalerating the paca of chcmge 13 "' '
1r. tre lwenlielh cenlury. Today they occome1oda1e o total of l
c~ntsrs ~up,¡nl,
14 '', ' ' jc' ,
people, reflechng lheir rde os o\ globd llows o\ f:80P 1.e. cu'1ture and ir.fcrrr.o11011 VVhde there 1~ 'h','

so~•ed
1
16 Co""
a handlul oi c¡Cf·reg¡ons ct t'n¡s sede ep lo 111e md-t,venlle'h ce·,tur'(. the num'oer o 4)-J by 2005_
17 '~"'"'
18 Lcooh
19 Ch'"''
10 N6io''·""·'

Looking at the global distribution of the million-plus city regions on thc 2013 map, M;o
Co"o'
China (79) and India (53) have larger nulllbers than the l'nitell State:s (50). fu>gi<ma jolmio
\f,cqfa,
Europe: (GO) hao fnver milhon-pluo city-rcgions than Latin Amer\ca and the Catibbean
' '"'
IO.Ih,
and almost the same number as thc African continent (57). Thio di>;uibucic>n<C<>'U'"'"''
' M"'"" ·''•
the statisucal e:videncc indicating an unusually tapid urbanizatlon of the world's 'o ''"'".
'"'""''
countries in the past half-century. In 1950, d~;Ydoping countri~;s contained slightly less '" NcHYco'

" S6oPoo~

M"~b,.
40 pctcent of the wotld's urban population and by \970 they still acCO\.Intcd fot less . " A,,,¡,
Lo,
:BoToo .•

"
50 perccnt. This figure climbs dramatically after that, so that by 2005 only 30 " o,•,a
B"l'"9

the world's· urban dwellers are in "dcvelopecl" countrie:s, and almost four out of " """""•'"
"
d>vellers in the year 2030 are expccted to live in developing countries. Perhaps thc " co·o

" ~m
Kdlo1o ICol
'"''
rapidly urbanizing continental region has been sub-Saharan Africa, wh.ich is ''"""A'~'
7
Bo,g\o'<
havc a larget share of thc world's urban population than Europe by 2030.
'""'""
l•loob,l

Thc evolution of megacity regions also deserves atrention. By the middlc of

"'""'"
logo.;
RloJo.iac~."'
ccntury, Greatcr New York City was the largest city-rcgion in tc,cw,,dd,with •P"P' Pm~ ;,"''"

of over 10 million. But it was soon oycrtakcn by Greatct Tokyo, which became
city-rcgion to pass thc 20 million mark ar the time of Japan's high cconomic
the Tokyo Olympics in the mid-l960s. By 1985, there \vere st.ill only
but the list incrcased rapidly in the next two dccades. Figure 10.2lists the 29'
o ver 1O million in 2013, along wilh the world's 20 hrgcst cities in 1950 and 1985. Notable designation, and there are man:· uugrants fnn11 the c<Junrn·c..dc· 111 Ulk' .lll

.' rlo •1 1
fwm this data is the shift in the world's urban center of gra\'ity. In 1950, the 10 largest cities
of the world included only three in what could be described then as dcyeloping countties wbl,,mof time-lags in thc dcmng:raphic mcaonrcmem ¡Jrllce,,: lt ,¡]," ¡·elle•' -, ( 1.1111.
P
restricting population mobilit:· a m\ emph·a¡i1ing \ltiJ,1lll/ ,m< ,n ,: 1 rhc: u , 1.:w·· , 1"_..
(Shanghai, Buenos Aires and Calcutta). By 2013, the North Atlantic I3asin could only claim
the gwwth of smaller cirie:; ha, been encouugnL incrc-.hinc>; "'' 11 " ' · 111 .,.,
New York among thc 10 largest cities o[ the world. Only three more megacity regions (Los '1\
"
the conccntration of thc popnlation in thc largc:'l ciric~ m thc: C<>,l".ll :·c·ce 1, ...
Angeles, London and Patis) were in North America am\ westetn Europe.
howe\Tt, clid not <;top tbe enmlllllU' dc~n<>vnphw l".dl

Emphasizing thc regional düntnsion of the contcmpor;~ry urbanization process helps to ID<"IÍ"'nof tht coastal urban cures, 1\·irh thc· pandn:o..Jc.d tc'ulr th. 11 1:h ,ll'c ,1

undtrstand better both what ha~ been happening to thc oize and gtographical scope of gh""'cpoctcd urbanizati'm raté" are a):;,' \1-hdt thL· brgc:'r :l~ln~lwt, , , t' 1. · 1, 1L. :·

urban agglomcrations as well asto their interna! confi.gutation. Over tht past 30 years, the y <e>iidc>n<;are located.
modern mctwpolis has been experiencing a distinctively regional urbanization process, in
which urbanism as a way of life, once confincd to the historie central city, has been spreading ,· i,c<tho<i"'d and often unreponed tmgr~nr, are an tncr~aolllc>; pt·· •.Jkn 111 lile 1. 1·~ .··

Shanghni' alone, thc oo-called tio,ninl.':,' ¡)o¡)ubti<Jil ,,.· .1lll' '-',l'l' , e·te·c: Ll'll.l
.:1 '11,!
out\vards, crtating urban densities and ncw "outtr" and "edgc" cities in what were formerly
suburban Eringes and grecntield ot rural sitcs. ln somc ateas, urbaaization has expanded on .. m><ted >obcb<'"'"''"3 and 4 millirm. ad,l!n'-': almn'l 211j'l'l'Cc'tl; ·', 11le·, ,r·l ,.~,,¡
. As tht economic >timc1lu~ of llH>c hrge c1 J.lq,¡[ .tc:,c:lr ,:nn,\1 ¡, ,1·, '·''
cven largcr regional scalts, cnating giant urban galaxies with population sizes and degtces '"
of polycentricity far beyond anyrhing imagined only a few decades ago. Although the rate ],::~:~~::::~1:::·:~:~:':~·;', m~n1· ne:u·lw '·rural tn\\·n¡" '1.1\ ,. IJ,'( 'll 111t!L. ,¡ "1 .. ,
11

n in size.'' Thc popubri"n o l. r!H; ~·,mm:rh ru: 1l1 ,1·. :c,h i',, 1),
of population grmvth in so me of the largest megacit)' rtgions has slowed somcwhat in thc
Kong and Shen7hen, for t\:atnplc:. h>1> rc.lc:wJ :n•:lc' h .1 ~ 111111 1.
fact of official census data, \vhen viewcd from a btoader spatial perspective the
.tlv
megicity regions have conrinucd to cxpand in chamatic ways .•An incrtasing shate of
world's population is now being absorbed imu expanding regional networks of m;c., "'ai ,,!u;honi,cion statisncs. are ·a 1·iral pan '>f thl ¡.:n >\n:l , '~ 1" ,[·.e ,·1111 le
ioterconnectcd lll~gacin· rc:g1mh.
in sorne cases city-regions are coalescing inro evtn hrger agglomerations in a process
can be called "txtended regional urbanization."

impottant hallmarLo of thc· urh.m gl• ,IJ:¡[ .l:~L·, e '.le n.l 'le. 11·
Much can be learntd about this extended form of rtgional urbanintion by looking "
reccnt developmenls in China, \vherc at lea~r thrte cxpansi,·e mtgacity regions-in bcyond offi.cialh· design:tted urban :1r, ,\ '· Dv,plt e 1l1e, 1 ", ·\'

11< ,¡ \e· c_::'le;·

Ptarl Rivcr Delt~ and in thc txpanding hintcrlands around Shanghat and
,,[e

bccn co~lescing into a giant Chintse urban galaxy. Consen·ative cstimatts suggtst that '·''·
of the megacity regions contains at lcast 40 million peoplc, depending on how they Flotida, kmJ\\·n ffJr h1' \nnk ''il ere·:: ti\<. e' tic'. h. ',LIII

delincd and hounded. Strong atguments c~n be made, however, rhat "'"'"u'l f•o¡ml,ci< global insritution compik:; and rc:jliJt't' -;,·, L'!li.tllc' J .. ~.

are m u eh higher. In less than one-third of a ctntuty, China has cxperienced what is tcrritori·al uniu of t"da_1 \ ,:;_lllh:d e·<, 'll< >ll
has prepared a prelmllll~n\· ,~,,,¡ 'L' ,L'LII\ e· 111 ·11'1'"1·: ,
cenainly the largest scale of urbanization and thc most rapid 1 ·, 1 ''
meg~cit)' region~
human history. In 1970, China could be de~cribtd as a country of "limitcd nÜ<'ni,cio< 'l<>pol<"'• inll'I'ClJl'ncct ,.,: .:' 1 .. " .1 · 11, , ..

"''"'l"h·e;eicm• of older lliJrJom , u eh .1' l'a' ,.; eL ( , . . k··

whete less than 20 percent of tht national pupulation lh-ed in citits. By the eady "
megalopolis" and incre;¡~in,lfh" roetrhk 1he· , l:.q•c , ,¡·
fi.rst centuty, the urbanization ratc of China had officially reached 40 percent-the
"continental city" in CrcLk.
avtragt for devcloping countries-and it is exptctcd to pa% tbt 50 percent
thc next decadt.
modificd vers'ton D f Fl
~ 01·ll¡as
' c'illll:llo
· ''~ trc:._o,¡], '1'' '.11 ·1 ··
,¡,one;of mano-regional tnbml~/dll"il c.,n k· :ck:wl.c·,¡· '.,, .. ,
This would rtprcsent a net addition of around h;¡[f a billion pcople tu the Chinese
and North America. l'hc :-ubregnm- u ,m¡o:·:,illc: 1lh ,, 1l·11 , ,
population. Yet eYcn these figures probably umlerestimate the magnitude of
10.3 (next page). Thc super C<JiltinulL1l e< ,nurh lli<., , ·1· -....,. ,1
urbanization, esptcially givcn the country's cunent GDP pcr capita and its
thrce, reaching over .)11() mili ton P"ople 1).\,ul ,,ni\ , ,.1 , ,1·1·,.,
high industrialization rate.~ Thc suspected undercounting can be attributed to
factors. Therc are recently urbanized arcas that have not yet bten reclassified and rcgmnall)· intcgL1kd C(>L:Ill!''·. c<,!lltlhuic' 1
 the absence of an overarching metropoliwn
POPUtATION
!m·ll,o"l
MEGACITY REGIONS with the . Euro-Lowlands 10 the 11 ort h \\·est
. . !S ·,m extended Gr ".
south he the Euto-Heartland and ; ·b I .:ater ]J,ndun, anJ ., r_Lc·
1.r - tah·, to u'e flont.L 1\ llll • Tl
ASIA Greoler Soppor<>
of development, concentrated a. :l l ' lll:' ll' L<'dl]''"lrc .¡·
Greoler Tokyo ,¡oum Wlal sorne ha\ e called f"uume\ 'L-\lu- 11
Mid-Jopan
conscitutes the continent's· econom·1C_ engme.
. , 11 • 1 , " ,n¡n 11 1
surpasse~ 200 million etc 1 ' -k~.l¡,,.,,,jj¡, :
Osalo- Nagoyo In :::\mth .-\1nerica \l"h ...
Ky-fuko-Shim<l ~3 8 '
Fuluo'<a. H~ro.~hr~.a. Kiroloyoohu
GreolerSeoul
Seo-JI, Be~>an, Doegu, "lae•,on, Gwungjc
. .
and Ch1-P1tts havC! becn .
' rhe older Gottmnnn-idc:ntitiecl
l l
CX!Cill el lO incJude thL· ('Jl) 1Ltn
m~galop,¡]J,e· <J~
llr"
1 "ln:1nglc· ,,- "'· 1,¡., 1''"
•
Gre<llorloipoi
"la•pe1-C\1uogli, Koo\1,ung-"la"'ao. "lo"Ouog
GreoW Soijiog 50.5
ateas to rhe south and we'r . l .State\. T( rl
· m rhc L' n1te\ \ · · '
Be1jing, nan¡in, longo'mo be added a growing Pacific Ri l . J l:'i- tl:muc nr,en c·u i"ilc
Shang-Kiog 400 . m mega opol!s strCLchiJw [·1 111 \'e .
Shor•ghal, Nan¡ing, Ha,gzhou
coretstheearUerC lif.- "' " "m,,un:rr., l•iu.n.,
Hong-Zeng_
Shenlheo, Guongzhcu, Hong Kc>ng . ,a o1111a me~¿~dol)oh~
" ' l 1f ·S an-.S <lll -~San
, l·rancl,Cl\-S 1 ¡)
302.9 outwarclsmtol\--Icxicoanc\N • l . - , __ ¡_ lc-:•-·.r '\'.
Total
C\aL a lO lorm \\·hat :-:omt ct:lll .q:dr.l . ( :.llifi,L:ll.:
B
EUROPI: 49 1
GrooiOr Glo>gow
london, London
GrooiOr Moncho:;ler, L,verpao',, Lced,.-5\,elhdd, S"~"~hcr" . othet
. megalopolitan zonco can be ,, ~',.. , ..'"l!l>J;
· ... 1 . '1ap"
·l "r 1 11
dtmenswns to the concept of e _ ¡ .. l ·b . _· " nm:L t " y,-,': .d. ,¡,Jc-, 11·.·
GrooiOr Oublio

s~,,
' l ::;_ 1enL ec ur amzatJIJt' '- il '"1\111 lll(l"ll".L. ¡-,, ..
¡ 1 · \
Groator Madrid
two eading city regions p . , \,lr"¡'l'.
Lio-Porl '¡4é · ., " au1o an,1 Rl<l el· .. 1aneJnJ. 1lcl\'c ,_, 1-, ,1, 1
~.
LA>on, Portu
Graoler Pnri> 500 both physically am\
. functionalh- ' \\·hile mainuinm,c: clifr-,-,.,- · 1111 ,11'111clc.L'IIic_
. 1
EoJro-Lowlond•
Ruhr-Cal09"e, Am¡terbm-Ro;lerdom. Bru,ds-Ao'V€'? 1·lle identities, as well ao · · • .. , ,,,.
. mcreasmg decentralinfl{ m. ,,L '"UOeLll:'""'''
_ .
Euro-Sunbo\1
Barcdcna. Mor"'rlle, \'c'lcncra. lyon 22.0 rag:mentatlon -' :\ .· ·¡ . - .. ' 1'"- .rl/"
he" f h · " stmt ar 1nregration prnc,·:-::-: lO '•C<"lll'l'lll,i.: 111 , 1 , ~[¡ 11 ,.
Euro-H«rr~ond
SruJgart, ¡,,k\url, ,I.'LJnohc·m
.,,veen t e !\YO le:~ding_ 1nenopo
. 11tan re!--'-Hill'< , 1 t 1:\ .
~~t:loZ,~e. ';uci" 300-kilomerercorridoronthclowcrPar . llc"ll<·' _\¡--,,.lile: 1(
Greoter p,.,gue
hcdttvttloptoom of . ' ana Río de· h p].¡r,¡ lwc·· IJ,¡,,~:, \1:,
Euro-'Eo•l a connecung mfra~ttucture mttl ,,,.,.,.
Kalowrce, Bvdar•"'· V1enrro 260.9 t b ~- ·'ii1L' l'llV''· ¡[¡,.

'm~·
can e extendeJ funhcr to includ<.:: an incipienr
54 8 from Santiap,o de Chile to Belo Hmi71 ,, Jr:n.l :1 " l ,¡:·c--llill'.'-
NORTH AMERICA Bo<-W<r>h
Bostun, New Yor\., 1-\,¡',adclphro, Wo>hroglen
Tor---lluf.--(ho>le<
(aronlo, Bufido, Rochcs'ef, ().lowa, ~\on.,eor
ChH'ilt• Mnooopc'~< Asian subcontincnr, ccnainh· onc ". Lh~ h--" ' !ll.rc
l'ili>Durgh, Cl"'"'.orO, Dei·OI,, Conu·.nal•, Cf,rLOiJú. in th Id ¡ · · ·'.--Y' /<nlc''
Cho;rtlaolo
Aliac.la, Chorlo1le. Role1gh
' cm l'KcLit!Oll._lu~l
e wor , a so dese 1yeo; speád l _ ''"km, ,ll ¡[),

Gu\ICoo>l ¡ ¡·lorwonld lllcil1de

th e subcontinent'rle . Deih 1 \l?'- 1 ,
~·"""""· New Orlco•·>
,._,,.
Mra'"'• -r:ornv·. Ü"LJncb juc\<orr.·rlle
orCalcutta(159' . ll '-'·
· J, a" \\'e a:-: h:anKh ,·,, 1' 1- ·
- \ll'- "·
,, ·""':JI,
(16) l - J ) ,],l,"lll .
Dauolin
Dollas, Son Antoniu, lwll'n .· n addmon, the city-reglom ¡,¡- l3anl_l,:dol·c ·i ..~,
Saja\1<1 C<rli!omia
San frooor-co. la¡ Anqe1e1. So~> il"SO· T'loonn. l_n; V•go> rl•o""'' .~'¿xrccl• htgh-tech ind .· . · .1:1-l 11
USLHC~, lndu\ a\lWill<Jlin·
thctextile eh -. l l c~nrn<>' (_:lciii:LI ,, 1 \]_,, 11
Tot<>\ , emlul anl pharmaceut'c:ll CL''l'·.·r ,( lh 1r .,¡ ,·
• second urban-indn:;tnal centn llt- 1,_lhllrc ') __ ; Llc ,,,
10.3 The ri~e of the me~ssive city
large-scale regional urbanizotion \5 a leos well-known osped of tf,e cantemporary urban warld. tegions.11
unprecedentc:d, quosi-contlnenial srzes with rna¡or ogglomeratrom in Europe, Eost Asro ond Narth
the marn drivers of the global economy.
_ \O O\'c'l" 1--l-l1¡'1ill:llll ,dl'L',lc:'> ,LIIL' 'le 1 ·•

cltv rcgiuns in IndJa almll::. L- rban cclllc ,., ,1n· , '\ .,, ,. 1, . , , 11 ti
alrnost half of which is concentrated around Tokyo and thc natroW Kanto megalopolit:~n forrn~tiom \nrl· rh- 1 . -
· L '-'."" ''1l,lllr~r.l'i:Lc _,.,
1
;¡cmticoul,dy h ·
mcgacity regions in the coast:~l areas of China, the Korean na'sl·
1 e Golden (Juadrangle lllL"''<l-llr"l''.' , 1
'' , ... c'l\'-''~1·"'
areas of high cconomic and demographic dynamism. l di atgesl meg:~c
' 1 n- ·· \\"hil e .'llliC ll 1-é,l.HCh ¡, c·c·c[ ,·.· C<l 1
- re"Jons
e
urbunization
·h g enc1ates
. _ ..lll the suGc"nLinen · \, ..'·", 1, ' -\·.lll'tJc, 111 ,---
The transnational rnegalopolitan population of Western Europe adds up Wltth processeó of] ~tge-sca
. " . 1e mepdupolnan "n>\':11' l:l llhil:t
260 million, with the largest cluster of SO million in what Florida e now bll!"gcomng lileratmc (lll urb,m C:hlll.l lu'. [[,,n,LI ,¡,
Lowlands, a densely urbanized region spreading across six countries and
 l
.~. lll~c¡ua ·¡;1:1~
as well as ncgatin" spillo,·er effe c.f' t1ataggr;rntk<;{JCJ!
l . 11

not induLle the subcontinent in hi~ maps of the New :Megalopoli~e~ eithet. 1-Iow best to sustainability. Stud,·ing the po\\crful fnr ..
·
the springboard fot some {Jf the m
co thM emanare i-rc 1•11 1 , ,¡, .
..
lt:· .lrlci cT\ 1"•
.
·'
· ''-.). '•nc·r:ll"l< >ll L l' .>c·c, >:llc
>~ k ~lp<
identify the subregions of this zone of accclerating urbanintion, and assess its economic ost e;..cltmg tl·ocarch lim!Jn.L:c; dl 1 1 1 1
and regional studies. lt. · C< 1".1"' :.1rh.u
potencial in the global economy as wdl as for more socially inclusive ¡¡.nd environmentally
sustainable form~ of urban development, will have to await further research.
Globalintion
. . and the forma' non t J t" a 1N ew Lcon"m'· h:\H: ll<>f be""\ ·e"\ li 1l
mdustrJalorposturbanera astnlm·l . . · '·',e e: 1•· .11'·•·1
'fhe urbanization of the world can be extended still furthet, beyond the 500 million-plus . . ' ' · lJ"I e e 1Jlme,l, hut rathcr 1<,
ofurbanmdustnalizarion rl1'tl m t . . :\ nn\· .md c!.lt"clc':ll 1·· •,llh'
city regions and the emerging mcgalopolitan city rcgions and urban galaxies. More than . ', urn,Jscrc:tunganL·w,¡m\,l!r"t~ ..lll 1 ,,¡. 11
· econonuc dcvelopmenr. For mosr of · .- "· · 1 _:,.,'.e:: lj''l
evet before, it can be said that the Earth's entire surface is urbanized to somt degree, from . . ' r1lt pa;r 2011 1·earo, :1ch c:ncn: r· 1 1 11
bcen ughrlr confined geographicall· . " : ' ' ,,[ .11dL <r·. i/,tli• ,
tbc Siberian tundra to the Brazilian rainforest to the icecap of Antarctica, pcrhaps evento •"'pitoli" . ancl for much t' ' } lt> [le 1
ma¡or urb.1:1 Cc'11l\'"' ,,. r11c· .1cl ... :c.·.'
,( countnes .
the world's oceans and the atmosphere we breathe. Of coursc, this does not mean there are ' o t11e t\1·ent1eth ce 111 ., .1 · . .
~c·u
ooontcio>.The fa T . . \ll" ' k\\ mclu,·n.dl!u , .,·1.
dense agglomerations everywhere, but the majar features of urbanism as a way of lift- . 'mtlar mternatJOnal di"l"i5ion (lt" lab!lr C(m.;iotitl_\:' ,¡· 1 ll''l. ,.,,¡ .
ftom thc play of market forces and the effect of administtfltive regulatiom, to popular . . wughlj" rcduced ro a "\Jorth-Scmth di\ Kle, are''" p11tll.il·il' :re lll' ,·:: 1 .. l.lc:1
cultural practices and practica\ geopolitics-ate becoming ubiquiwus. Toa degree not seen orgaruzanonal form and le 1 el of UJ.1)JTl me
· 1u,tn:ti prociucl!<Hl ,¡m] e, •:l,llll.l)il•... ,

befare, no onc on Earth is outsidt the sphere of infl.uence of utban industrial cRpitalism.
fairly stable geo·Structural all
lmttti.,L.,ing , .. · . d!Yl'lnn ,,t. th··' ~·•• ,,.1,· 11:1' ' 11 el L.,·
1 1 rcJiltOll:tl
Globalization, Urbanization, lndustrialization d countries
b has been radical\: rcconfiLtun:d
< 1•\.c'tlhc. p:1'1 '.·: . ,, 1..
ur an industrialistlJ inw \\·hat can be cdul
The extended utbanization of thc world opens up new "vays of understanding the :"''"cion< of ''Asían Tiger.;"
' l1't\"e
' ,,,. ue.ctn . IJ,t ,f :\ 1 l
" l .1 ¡.:n>\\"llllf ., ,,
force~ that have led to the fotmation of
ftom the e·uly . l . · · ' ., > l·lu.'l .. tll/.c r
,'-/ globalization of capital, labor and cul.ture, ancl the ' , group r1at mcluded 1-iflll\.; ¡,,m, ¡-,I.I\ .. IL :-,, ' h ¡..,,1
a new modc of capitalist dtvelopment-variously c\escribed as posr-Fordist, m to the mo~t recent exp
. ¡o~Jon
· ol. urban mdu,rr:.tl
' ¡ :·c >lluc··:, ,11 :ti (
1 1'
,,
information based. The spread of urbanism and tbe characteri~tics of mbon i,nilu•tti'l ost populou~ counrne~ on Eanh · l.re·1·,\lll,1 '>llc:c il:c· cLl'"'C "' "'
capitalislll can be seen ~~~ the distinguishing feature of tbc current round of intcnúfi<d ·
becamc a Celtic Ti gcr, am1 at lea~r
nnnl the \!¡,:Jal r.·cc·"i' :1. •.h. ( ,¡,,

globalization. Commercial capitalism was globalized centuries ago, creating mocmoril in Europc. Regardle\S of the ',uiabl"'Lne ,,~· mcll\idL .. tl c, 1,,,_ 1¡
1
world cities such as Amsterdam and London. Financia! capital was diffused "'"ncci;m. '·'.1 11 elgnYa,c:~''·''ra¡'ln•:~·,.:JL,,
of NJCs continucs lo '"'<>row a~ "\. ·l l l
.. ¡_
·with the spreaLl of colonialism ancl impctialistn, ccntering financifll powet in such '! Wlth the urb·anizmion of ¡he w¡d,l.
commancl posts flS London, París and New York. Over tbe past 30 years, global
and financifll Bows have been expanding rapidly, bur what is most new and different ""it;lir<od spaces hale abo bcen den::lrnwl,L: \1 ltllin "l:\11< ,., '1 1•

been the globali;ration of productive or industrial capiml-that i~, ~ · 1 urJan

f. areao tXI)t1"Jtl1ce r apll 1 .llldt<,ln.di/, 1.¡,,. 1 ll:c

production of goods, services Rncl information, facilitated by the <evolucic,nininfotcm'ci 0 Industrial dn·elopment m ( hina ¡, <>JK c;-.;:un·, .. 1\ .'1• •11
11 1 . 1 •'

and communications technology, and reorgani:ted in what is now called the New so-ca eL l•rostbelt or Rll'-tbclt and rhe ~lll;hdl l"l ¡h·
.cctle. ntlthe metl"opolmm regiun, mam IK\\" in, lu' rr' .d , , ,1 ~ 1¡ 1,...
or Hexible capitalismY
f suburban or rural area>'.
once Th~ bec;t kil<l\'."11 c·:C,lll:)"lk ,¡" 1¡11
Urbanization, industrialization and globalization have been intimatdy tied w:gctbto< ttt o utban industrialism is pr,lnbh· Silil:lm \':ti k' 1 11
landscap ·" ¡ "''1.1 ' " ,,,. ·
sincc the lndustrial Revolution. Few human actidties gain as much from bdng f ' · es l:t\·e been deYelopin¡.': in ma:l\ cl[J L'l" IIL]• e 11 1 '

den~e urban agglomerations as industrial producúon or lllanufacturing.' o Industrial pso¡¿raphin \l·irhm nktr• ']" >il:,¡n 1ce:1< ,_ 1, :,1 ..

producets and consumers in urban space gives rise to a variety of og:glooc<t.,ioo<ccctn< . " 1)\"a snnultant<>l:'
to va1"ying' de gtee~ . l"t'C<éllrL"l 1,;,)t "'l. lih 1' 1
wbich can lcad to greatct productivity ancl technological innovation, thus
potencial snowball cffect that stimulates urban industrial e:s:pansion. "fhis bolds
only for making pins and needles but also for the production and exchange of · nnd teconfigurtd
conseque . ' ', i 1l cu~LII:\.1/:Jr:•
urlYl'l 1 ... ,,, ILl' ,._,'le 1'.1 ,,,
and the development of what are now being called the cteative or cultural h nccs wlth rcgard~ In the 'l)l"t:td uf .t ,e':1ub,d cullul·c·. (,
we have recliscovcted in recent ycars, cities in themselves, as socially '"'"''"'"'~¡ as been experienung all ·mcn·a ... ing ., 1u,d. c·c,,.,,,,-_, lhi ·.ll
habitats, generatt positive forces of creativity, innovation and econornic
 ~conomies ~''"
of
. sl.ums."" The expansion 0 f ur b an pm·ert1· h·as m·ade '"" _ . .. . 11 1111

homogenization, with ciües beginning to look what sorne commentator~ call a Coca- mformal
. .
go a1za ono t1eurban A
a dist . f
·r
·
mcme eatur~ of both 1
flC
extended "lum" · ncl l 1
urb,IJ1iZ,IlHIIlll[ <' ll
d~\\<Jll
.lllcÍILc·
dwellers-mor~
coloni:f.ation or N1cDonaklization or simply an Americani'l.ation of the workl. At the same lb 1 ti f 1 ' . ccoHJng tu tbc l'mtcd "'\1tiOil'
than one bill" llllc: llUt ni !bree .l: .J.I:I

conc~ntrari ti_~urc-
time, new patterns of differentiatíon and geogtaphically uneven development are emerging, , h 1'1lC g 1obal 1on people-li \ ·e 111- s1um,. s, )ilJl" h;r1· ·
1g er. f l ' " pur r11<- ,.,-,T

. . - :; r lt ot ltl", darkn ,¡,¡L. ,t- thL· '~~'"'' ¡ _,,

as the general processes of urban globalization take particular forros in the world's majar hconcentration of economic wcal_ l on o unan po'i"~l't\" i 1 l 11

Clll~blnlll,c:.
city reginns. With their cultural hybridity, physical and social fragmentation, Latín American l l aml palmea\_ \)0\\"CJ". l'rban 1
housed and undcremplm·ed p l are,h i'', , 1.
\'~!)'
megacity regions exhibit multiple prcdicaments and new opportunitícs of particular interest . " opu anons ha\"e been pan or- l . 1 1
from the begmning, btlt ne\"CJ"] ,f . • l t K 1Ilcil::-:ri,1l C<lj'11: lj, e'
17 - )C OJC U\T more people 1 -, ¡ 111 111
in the age of urban globalization. . today. The largest olum populati . .". n Cl urL.n ,_ui:l· 1 ,
cas~s
. ons ale lll the meptcitl re ,¡,11,.111 ..-
However one explains the change~ mentioned above, a strong argument can be made that sorne
.
accounting for
more tlan1
· g
thr~c-c¡uarrer' lit". ll' -
,l, '"l''l'l'lC:: ,., •L.nl"
. 1
;<l'""ionof transnationalmigr t" _ .l _i>Uill'h,dJI-,\:1 ¡[ ,
the differences eristíng 30 years ago bet>.veen what could then be desctibed as First, Second a Jons 11as also crea tul 'rt _. , 111 _
g >\\In" ''ll ' ,,¡ 11h:: :1rc· :1'·'"
di~appearing, have
theimrnigrantworkin ·
and Third \'{lorld cities and urbanization processes, whik not entirely on on. g poor m ouch global pmnr ct:nters- ''- l. :\. . ' .
L\l ''>L. l.c 1, 1 ,, ¡,,
significantly decreased, as virtually all cities are cxperiencing sorne dcgree of globalir.ation. L d
This has led to tbe unexpectcd situation, in -which we can learn jmt as much about the new
·-r
urbanization processes from Mcxico City,Johannesburg and Shanghai as -..ve can from New

York, London and BeJ"lin.

today in what Daús proYocatin·h· callo '1 "'l~h . - 1 , 11
ofurban ·., · ' .nunr 'litll'. 11, ,, 1,
The old International Division of Labour (JDL) has beco significantly transformed by '"U
\'· lücm< poverh
ofl 1 to
' anulllluestluned embr:tcc nf Ir ,r·l _, ' .
... ,, l<>i'(''' -_k IL:•
these simultaneous processes of global homogenization and differentiation. \'Y'hat was once oca, natJonal and SUI)r;)llafh
' )[U • 1 _L';I>\CriLII:Cc"
_ d:c ,\llcl-ll
' · .11'1
""
conveniently charactaized as North vs South, for ~xample, has been broken into three Mstructural adjustment pnJgrams illl',l<l:''-'1
•• 1•• •k"riri
, ll.t· ,,
continental zones focused on the three super"siz~d urban G.elds mentioncd earlier. f lionetary
· Fund, r~duced state reS"JIJil'
1 11J .ni~' (rn· ,,(" 1_,1 \\ 1.,-- "''-
three global core regions, Notth i\rnerican, '\<.lest~rn European and East A;ion--<clon¡:"'iili 0 po eJes fostering liberaliza' ti(',''• l l·. ,
Cl<::_L';lll;)flr)ll 1 [ 1
heglobali7ationoftheurlY1 1' . _nc cc·ccLir.lil/.11'''1• llt
cl
panofthcstonofllll-,;rnr~'rrmtulll'
their continental spheres of iuOucnce -cleFme a ne-..v ttipartite Global Division of T • 11 unge-.. •,U'f\'_, 1 ¡]1,
--"''''"-,·,-..¡,.-,,,, .,,, ¡,
(GDL, as global replaces internacional) linked within and bctwcen cach zone by ,;e<-enba
uan:;c~nd nacional borders and connect in an ""'"''P'"''ing ,vc.üclwi<l"''
l<'

net-..vorks that
lncreasingly, th~
geographical and functional organization of thc global economy the growth of urba 111,.,,.," .. 1,. 11a" bcu:
LL ,\11 .1lm'''' ,·c¡u.ill' j_¡ · ',, ¡,

to hingc arounU a new powct hicrarchy of fi.nancial command centcrs, led by the cruce< g<~ 1 l ·'nc:HIYe-- cl:i,-.. .. 1i·.u· ~e·.'- ,-,· ·111>,--
1,
N~w York and Tokyo, and buttressed by a gcovúccgnum'
"cicui<cd:v ioBmmiol
"capitals of capital" London, :.. ' ihl· c'"'·-1·
c-fftct un sha1)in¡_; ' '.11 lll 111' ,,
-~ -,..'" "·.
1

o a new du·th
·f d
1
. ,S!TI111t1t\H!l"id\, l11,1]11! _,· , ,]¡>·¡·
llliL''• 'lll'l\-
of ever more interconnected anll synergetic global cttie:;. !O m ustnalb . . ' ' ,,-,lli"!r
ourgeoJOIC and urban prolcbrl:l: ·;,·1,,
inmanvp · .,,·."'
Rvery onc of the city regions articula tes with the global cultural anll political "''"'"" ~ arts ni llt'
1 de,-c[,,pcd 1\'>rhl 111
different ways, creating a mixture of similarity and difference, along with a growing Second \"Vorld
. \\",.,n,abutgeonln.L:IIIiclc'c
_ cLi" \l¡l,,,,_,~l-, 1,,
of emergent hybridities and "fusions." Understanding how tb~ general featur~s of m~gaClt)" t~gions llln\" be neat·ing rl:c· !'' >11 \1 l1uc ¡_, 1

urbanization combine with local particularities in th~ growing list of ci<~-ecgic>n•<, '"' .' resident<; ,f l'Uank l 11' 1 - :
¡e.ottificod neighborh 1 , e - _, ,l'-'k'- ,¡r. ~u¡-
regions and emerging megalopolitan city regions will require rigorous '"'' cocopcdn oot' 111 rhe urb:l!l cnre, "!tul, .ll :,1' 1"' ll 1!
comparative analysis. Such analyses must be ~sp~cially cognizant of the multiple
which the urbanization process is expres~ed: global, supranational,
1
nacional, ,
and regional, mctropolitan, municipal, neighborhood and locaL however
. 'not to IJY~r~mphaoi/e "r 'lllljl!it"\ ¡[Ji, rlu. ,l•
rigorous comparative analyses of thesc muhiscalar urban globalization p<<o<OC''"''
theUlcom~distr"L
. much more c"ml1 fl-, 11
th~ -..vorld's citi~s onn <>'Y
_ _ · Li,J::llclliL'cl.mcll- ,, 1
examine some of the majar changes taking place within 1 utwn, l(Jr txanipk, i" 1 , 1 .<,¡_,,~ 1 , 1 , Ir
andun¡1r r 11 _._,,·e·,,,[¡¡¡,
e e Jeta) e than ,.,-er hef,
- >r c.. '- -" >t fl"l '

An important starting point in looking at the changes that have taken "'''" wit new and olcl \\ca
.. ll
t l, the ll<l\1\l',H: no+,· ' '~()\\' - -' ''- .llll,li, 11

regions over the past 30 years is what Mike Davis r~cently dcscribell as the
 what is now . the .densest urb amze
. d area m . the United Sm .
metropolitan regmn for thc lcad in tes, pass1ng New York City's
attached to the neologisrri of yuppie, there are many variations that have developed within . 199O. At another extreme a. A . __
Dettült and St I.ouis, where th fl re menean cJtJes such as
the upper income brackets ovet the past 30 years. Especially relevant to the city-building . e out ow of pcople and johs has b
tnflow of ncw rnigrants, reducing th .· . · een fal' greater than the
P'"""' fo< '"mpk, ¡,' gwwing pobücy bcnvcco tho;c who ";cccde' fwm thc city ,od e 10 1a1 clty populatJon 0
dty region) to Jess than half its D . )Ut not that of the surrouncling
urban responsibility by moving into insular gated communities and those who commit ormer stze. Statistics showin innel' i -
.. other parts of the world the . g -e ty populatJon losses
themsdves much more to urban regeneration as genttif¡ers and inner-city dwellets. ·. ,__,. ctm,nV>md severa! other, fotmet specJa. 1 case
- ¡· of decli ning clty
. populations in formel' Fast. ,,.1
. -socla 1St countries and . ·
populatJon growth slowdo ' some tecent data indicating 1
1
Speciali<'.ed ethnic niches further complicate the restratification of class, creating growing . . wns or evcn decline in the ce 1 ..
odM,oil'• hO> led toa growing research and bli . . ntra ntles of Paris, Seoul
disparities of wealth and social mobility among immigrant populations, as well as ·¡ . pu e policy 1nterest 011 " h · .
wlt l thc tmplications of d ¡¡ . s nnking cities"
aggravating divisions between domestic and immigrant populations of the same ethnic · ec ntng urban growth rates_zt '
gwup. Onc mu<t ,\w be ""ful oot to ,;wmc 'withcüog 'w'y of thc old middlc d"' i
1

due to the growing polarization between the tich and the poor. ln many ways, a .
difficult to make. anv, genemli za ti onsaboutwhathasbeenha . ,
m the megae1ty regions of th Id ppenmg to the older urban !
globalized middl.e dass is being reconstituted in the world's majot ciry-regions, in bctwcc<i.i . e wor ' for the variations are almo . .
reasons that policy and plannin f . . _ .· , st endlcss. Th1s ts one
(and sometimes overlapping both) the uppcr 20 percent and the lower 40 percent of '!'
•ocom¡,ctiti·,;c,gcncu<in¡, ~;h<o1: . as ecome so challengin
g oJ lmtotlc clty centers h . b
ohno.gcmo~in"relies
income ladder. And it too is incrcasingly heterogeneous, fragmented and unpredictable new mdustries related to citv- . . g
evems su h _. _ - malketlngand branding.
011 e as mtematlonal exhib 1· t' ( ¡
its politics. extravagan7.aS such as the G d . lons, ) ympic Games ancl
~' . · and dcregu1• -
'"cnttoli,<tic<O
1
e lf)'- CSigned (':ruggenh elm
. J\Tuseurn in Bilbao
What is perhaps most important to understanLl about the new urban division of a1Ion everv local ·
at<tcnticm,incc<;tn;c<ot, d . ' ' governrnent vies with thc othcr t
also about its spatial exptession, is that it is signifi.candy diffcrent from what it was 30 an tounsts. Although some li s . . . s o
of poverty and inequalitv S eh .. P ClVJCe IS often given to local
ago. There are sorne pervasive continuities with the past based on dass, tace and ·' ·u compet!tlve urban " , f -
global irnage have ¡ m . . . ¿· wars or lnvcstment, jobs
but simply projecting past trends on to the present, without recognizin'g what is ' 11 anj- cltles, !verted attenti 00 f _ '
welfare, theJ"eby aggmvati h . . rorn socml sen• ices and
different; can lead to misundetstanding and oversimplifi.cation. Take, for example, ng t e mcreasJng economic . ..
feature~ of the new twhan geography that has been crr<ccgh<ginm"
that have been an in te , . f mcqualltles and social
the characteristic g-a1 pano thene w ur b anlzatlon· . processcs.
the world's majar city regions, the so called hollowing out of the historie central.
of its formeJ· domestic population. Should this be seen as a form of urban decay, the varying fates of centJ:a · · the<' ,·o ,"altycearg
. 1 cJtles
' '-- 0 f .1 1 1
manydeveloped-wo·ld . . . ' enera trend affectjng
perhaps the declining significance of downtown nudei in an age of the 1n<cccn<"''d.i r cJty-regJOns 10 conjuocti ·h
of the "1 00-mile cit)', th 1 , on Wlt what Deyan Sudjic has
communications? Or is it justa product of continued suburbanizatioo or the · ' ere las been a growin ·b . .
parndoxical twists on urban 1 b li 22 g ut antzatlon of suburbia,
effect of market forces? What are the implications of decenttalizatioo and · go a ty. Asolderin1e 1 ·
replaced by new · . r-cJty arcas have their
ltnmlgrants, new urban growth is taki . '! ¡
city densities for public policy? , as once relativel , h og place m outcr
} omogeneous dormitor; sub b
parts of ¡:; _ )- ur s become dties in
One interestiog case is Osaka. Once reputed to be the densest city in ]apan, ormer suburhm, there are now more ,ob
cultural and entertainme . __ l s than bedrooms,
is now almost devoid of a resident population, but has experienced little of ¡cgcidl<,dc 1 , nt faCilities, and growing ptoblems of crime
seen in the West.lts large downtown is thtiving as a center for commerce, ''"'P'"'•" . n many cases, the old sociospatial duali . . '
cntertainmcnt and the creative industrie~. The inner ring around the center !,'' and distinct ways of life has b
' .
¿· sm of utbamsm and
. egun to JSappear, as the modern

mean::~e:~a:r:aO~)~~:~v~~i;~:~~~sr~::~;:gmaanyt
increasingly dense, and suburbanintion not onl.y sprawled outwards but also
as well as grow mg
111ng
agglomerated as part of the vast and polycentric :Mid-Japan megacity <egioo. ''

Greatcr Los Angeles pro-vides another moLle! of inner-city tmnsformation.

Riots in 1965, as many as 1.5 million white and black, 1"gc1ywc•<kinjl c1' becomesmban¡ netwodcing
. of thc megaCit)'
. regJOn
. reflens these
the inner ting surrouoding downtown left the area, many settling furthet . ncreasmgly unbounded reconfi
being reshaped b h . ' gmed and rescaled .
Los Angeles region. In the past four decades, however, nearly 5 . th e . y t ree mterrelated forces: the globalizati f
e iOtmatJon of a " new economy" variably described as' flexible,
on o
moved into the same area. When combined with incteasing suburban
transformed what was once the !east densely populated major
global anJ information-intensive; and the facilitating effects of u~olccticmininlfo<m 1u
and communications technology. Cities are no longer spatially defi.ned by and
to their old metropolitan hinterlands or commuting zoncs, as urban cconomies
geogtaphicaliy reconfi.gured into multiple scales that connect the local with the global
ncsting of largcr and larger nocla! regions and inter-urban networks.
In this concatenation of regional scales, the globalization of the urban begins to
with the urbanization of the globe. Sustaining this transformative process has
extraorclinary expansion of population movements and migrations, "''"''"''tiim1d, ,[n,
nacional and within the urban region itself. The nature, impact and public policy ·
to these mass movements of people, from global cliasporas to local ncigl>b•odn
gentrification, differ greatly from place tu place, but neatly everywhere they are
what can be described as etises of governance and planning. Exploring this growing
of governance and planning brings us to the eoncluding section.
Towards a New Urban Agenda
\Ve live in a world where nearly one in six inhabitants is a slum dweller-and '"'"'""''
are growing. One outgrowth of the discussion about the simultaneous urbanization
globc and thc globalization of the urban, is the expectation that thc problems
with urban poverty and inequality are likely to shape local and global politics in thc twC(
first century more than ever before and in ways that few have anticipated. As these,
other utban ptoblems intensify, ptogram5 dcaling with them ata national scale have
to decline nearly everywhere. This has shifted attention and hopes f01' the future to
scales of intervention, from the global and supranational to the regional and locaL
As this rescaling of the utban action agenda pmgresses, it is becoming ¡·,"''"'ing!J"i'P'"
that the e::dsting govctnmental sttuctures and institutions are not yct organizcd to
the new responsibilities and, in many cases, adamantly resist any changes in their
and power. Resurgent nationalisms weaken the efforts of transnational ot¡g"'~"ti.'
such as the United Nations or the European Union to dcal with growing pt•nhletn'
urban poverty and social exclusion. Attempts to foster regional coorclination at the
nacional and metropolitan scales are often met with localisms, as existing local govctrun
turn instead to more entrepreneurial city-markcting stratcgics, competing for
investment dollars.
Any attempt to create a new global action agenda for the urban age must begin
awareness of the tensions that exist between established governmental struct~res
need to fi.nd ways of strengthening more ptogtcssive forms of planning =d ¡wlic¡•m
at every geographical scale. Rathcr than bemoaning the clifficulties uf this task,
we will identify sume of the most posicive developmcnts that havc been otcue<il~>gin i
ycars with rcgards to the challenges and opportunities facing thtecity-b•.úJ,j~,g ]ptt>ft'l
,ie¡ginn~ planning in the futurc will be increasingly shaped by new ideas about
effects of urban and regional economics. Prorninent economists, drawing
'"''"ing work of Jane Jacobs in The Econom] of Gties, have been arguing that
cailed the stimulus of mban agglomeration is the primary cause of economic
in the world today. Dense and heterogeneous cities and city regions have
e ddviing forces of the global economy, generating enormous wealth as well as
¡.··
cruiortC>WtlOrt and cu]hlta] C1'eativity.
,,1
l,
policymakers are accordingly giving increasing attention to promoting
economic integration, developing clustered f01'ms of economic activity
conclitions conducive to cteativity and innovation. But at the same time,
;mcr1ctitm' can also funcúon to intensify incqualities and social polarization, as
tttib,ticlg signiíicantly to global enviwnmental degradation. One majar challenge
of the city-building profcssions is to find ways to take advantage of the
of city regions and the creativc capacity of dense and hetewgencous
ohtion,, whilc<1Uhc same time controlling the accompanying negativc spillover
widening income inequalities and global warming to incJ"easeJ intercultural
conflict. Pinding an appropüate structure of local and regional governance is
reaches into the m·ban and urbanization spteads around the globe, new
are emetging that are likely to affect local cfforts to deal with urban poverty and
$1"ctggb over environmental issues and povetty becomc simultant'ously local,
itc,pc>litlm, tc>gi''"''l, nacional, supranational and global issues. They include the
call global civil society, global or cosmopolitan citizenship and identity,
ObiOIJ""'" movemcnt.
pttml>titmiÜ regional scale, perhaps thc most important counter-trend to the
,,,¡,¡ ']>ptmth to planning has bcen occurring within the European Union, one
¡d.m¡•o1ctant secdbeds fot a New Regionalism-or at least the reviva! of the older
urban and regional planning that had declined significantly with thc rise
state policies in the 1980s, and the unabated markct-driven globalization that
'"mf>l", of improved metropolitan governance worlJwide. The case of London
~,:';~~:,:'::::::: Reversing the trend towards fragmentaty governance and lack
\? planning, the Greater London Authority has been reinstated and now
electa citywide mayor who will be responsible for T.ondon's sustainablc
as a global city within the South-East of Rngland, thc UK and Europe. In
residents have also recently regaincd the right to vote for a municipal
)tFt•dccal Disttict, there has also be en an increased coopcration betwecn the
Vccmntnt, the District and the surrounding State of Mexico where more than
half of the eity region's population lives. ln Soutb A frica, the region of Gautcct• ¡
fi.rst in the wodd to be offi.cially dcscribed as a global city-rcgion. lncreased
betwcen the Johannesburg, Tshwane (former Pretoria) and Ekurhuleni (former East
metropolitan councils is leading to joint clevelopment programs ancl planning
. ti Llld ll•c •

that will allow the city region to attain a competitivc position in the global econoruy · ., thnn '"'"'"·'¡""'·"
. thot ·"'' "''' •:
reversing the fragmentary ancl racially exploitative pattcrm of apartheid urbanistn.
Wcicknfc·l.l <:el
"11· ,1,·
Not all mctropolitan reforms are state initiated. In the United States, tnany
1 '· "'' ,,
metropolitan initiatives of "growth with etJuity" have emerged from civil
particularly fJ"Otn coalitions of community-based and grassroots organizations that, 18
multiscalar organizing and coalition building, have been able to advance inn<wativo 1:·
2
cffectivc forms of community based regionalism. ' New approaches to "'1ouiltllitgtc,
regions" haYe been encouraged from another nongovernmental source, the John
Catherine T. MacArthur Founclation, \llbich in 2007 announced thc Cl'eation of
rescarch nctwork aimcd at expanding knowlcdge of "bow regions ~ha pe the
majar national and demographic challenge~."

In Latin Amcrica, a wavc of local democtacy has also swept thc region, as urban -·.,,," 20
movemcnts ha ve been able to cnter progrcs~ive electoral coalitions gaining control
1.1:·
"
govemments." Latin American cities ha\"e been producing highly inno\·ative utbsnpl;~, 22
23 "
:;trategies, ranging ftom the low-cost and socially inclusive rapid-transit sy:;tems of 24
and Bogotá to the connnunity architecture projects of CaracasY Tt ts dcar that the -1'''
-"" _,¡,,
urban agencia sh<mld nol he understood as a single and cemralizcd project, laceocl, ic 25

hands of elite institurions ami cmpowerccl professionals. 11,, ',1,¡

,,.¡ 26

Thcre are many different \vays to achieve greater ~oe1al ancl >patial justice in ccombio"' .. 11"'1 '' , ,.
__

with sustained ancl equitable urban developmem, but these effons will require
27
multiple scale:; of go\Trnance and in incteasingly eclectic conditions. For the ci<cy-bc<ik
professtons more generally, and architcct:; ami dcsigners in particular, this "IP""'"
special challenge. As Rem Koolhaas argues, "[rhis is] the first gcneration of "'chitc<OC" Í ,-,.,
~~igm·e Credti'~ .
,-,)[¡: '..,·,_
has had a direct experience of work.ing in so many diffetent urban :;ystems at ;C ~e·. ,' 1; 10.1

time."?' As a result, they havc the opponumty to shape realities that are auuned to
the largcr imperatives of the urban global age and thc localized and unique cconclicion<
each mdividual ctty region. F.specially important here is the need to refiect upon
fonn-making and site-specific physical intcrventions interact with the ccmwmitcolyo"'<m 10.2
of urban agglomeration and its capacity to gcnerate crcativitv, innovation and
development. The imeraction here must be madc to work cffecrively in both ditc<<tl<>< 10.3

··"1 '1