ABSTRACT
We are passing through a revolution that is unhitching the social processes of urbanization from the locationally fixed city and region. Reflecting the current explosion in science and technology, employment is shifting from the production of goods to services; increasing ease of transportation and communication is dissolving the spatial barriers to social intercourse; and Americans are forming social communities comprised of spatially dispersed members. A new kind of large scale urban society is emerging that is increasingly independent of the city. In turn, the problems of the city place generated by early industrialization are being supplanted by a new array different in kind. With but a few remaining exceptions (the new air pollution is a notable one), the recent difficulties are not place type problems at all. Rather, they are the transitional problems of a rapidly developing society-economyand-polity whose turf is the nation. Paradoxically, just at the time in history when policy-makers and the world press are discovering the city, “the age of the city seems to be at an end.”
