ABSTRACT

It is customary for books about cities to conclude – as earlier editions of this book did – with sections on the future of the urban world. And for the past several decades, speculations about the urban future have often referred to an emerging postmodern, post-industrial world order as different from the world of modernism and industrialization as that world was from the medieval or the ancient. A new “revolution” in the history of human development would be added to those posited by V. Gordon Childe – the agricultural, the urban, and the industrial (p. 31) – and a new urban future would unfold. Now, a global society has emerged. The urban future has arrived, the future is now!