ABSTRACT

The bright rhetoric of urbanology evokes a dramatic change in human prospect. The revolutionaries have set themselves against a long tradition of humanist anti-urbanism, much of it equally naturalistic. The new ‘urbanology’ is a tide of interest and ambition flowing into broad readerships and constituencies that heretofore showed little interest in urban issues. This urban literature is almost exclusively North American, mostly emanating from journalists, consultants and media-savvy academics in business and economics schools. The crypto-positivism evident in the new urbanology may conceivably reinforce the neo-liberal urbanism that has diminished human prospect in recent decades. The sympathies of urbanology certainly lie with market capitalism. In contrast with the normalising impulse of urbanology, the emergent urban physics seems more inclined to the idea of structural change, at least in terms of urban administration. A new urban political economy cannot be conceived without revival of critical social science and its anti-naturalistic conception of knowledge.