ABSTRACT
Cities are magical places; however, their magic is not evenly distributed. So uneven is the experience of city life that it would not be vexatious to describe the idea of an urban culture as oxymoronic. Indeed, Castells (1976) disserts openly on the ‘myth’ of urban culture and worries us with the threat of the conceptual confusion that stems from the pursuit of such an idea. But this is not meant to counsel despair or recommend an early abandonment of our topic. It is, I believe, an introduction to the complexity that confronts us, a complexity that is both challenging and exciting – and that, perhaps, is part of the magic.
