ABSTRACT
Studying cities is a vast and never-ending enterprise. There is too much material for any one individual to master and always more to learn. Fortunately many fine scholars, past and present, have focused their attention on cities. We now know a great deal about how cities evolved, their social structures, urban culture, their internal spatial organization and relationships to other cities in systems of cities, what economic functions they perform, how they are governed, how they are (and might be) planned and designed, and their possible futures. One premise of The City Reader is that much of the classic writing about cities over the past hundred years remains remarkably relevant today.
