ABSTRACT
With the publication of two new books-both by geographers-urban studies has decisively entered ‘the postmodern debate,’ determined, apparently, to win. Indeed, Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory and David Harvey’s The Condition of Post-modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change2 possess a winning combination: they bring together critical discourses about space, culture and aesthetics within the framework
of a social theory that purports to explain postmodern life. This formula has been used before, though never so thoroughly, by a disparate group of scholars who, over the last decade, have written not only about postmodern culture but about modernism as well.
