ABSTRACT
The ‘city’ appears as such a prominent feature of social life in so many contrasting cultures and historical epochs that one might suppose the question of what all such ‘cities’ have in common to be long-settled. Yet this supposition is quite unwarranted. However impressive the monumental public buildings, the spatially concentrated specialist urban functions, and the selfconscious pride of city dwellers may seem from time to time, the attempt to provide a generic conceptualization of the city has proved an elusive, and some would say fruitless, quest for urban sociologists and historians. While many scholars operate as if terms like ‘city’ and ‘countryside’, ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ were grounded in unproblematic definitions, grave doubts have been raised as to the coherence of the idea of the city and of urban social institutions as discrete objects of social analysis and as autonomous causal forces in their own right.
