ABSTRACT
Introduction Much of what constitutes modern social life today is the product of the city and of the ‘urban experience’. This chapter considers the changing nature of that urban experience during the problematic and contentious period of accelerated social change and structural reorganisation that is now referred to – often in very loose and abstracted epochal terms – as modernity. While the term ‘modernity’ generally refers to ‘the modes of social life and organization which emerged in Europe from about the sixteenth and seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became world-wide in their influence’ (Giddens 1990: 1), our concern here is with the more developed forms of modernity, modernisation and (later) modernism that emerged in the 19th century. This period is significant, for it marked the emergence of the concept of modernité as a significant analytical tool for understanding society and its associated institutions. At the same time ‘modernity’ signals an awakening selfconsciousness about what it was that was distinct about this era. Lastly, as David Clarke has pointed out, ‘it is in the nineteenth century that the immense and varied changes wrought by modernity seem to centre inexorably on the city’ (1997: 222).1
