ABSTRACT
This book is written with a number of objectives in mind. It is, first of all, meant to act as a guide for students to the theoretical framework of urban and regional planning. As such, it may also prove of interest to students in the related fields of development studies, human geography, urban politics and urban sociology. Perhaps a book which speaks to a potentially wide academic audience could be thought lacking in specificity; however one of the strongest intentions behind the writing of this one has been to demon strate the artificial nature of the barriers that have been erected between the social sciences. This is not to say that an academic division of labour is not both a necessary and a desirable thing, but rather that the point of any division of labour is to create a more productive and useful synthesis than can be achieved by more exclusive methods of production. Urban and regional planning, and the spatial development processes with which it is concerned, is a good vehicle for the inter-disciplinary, co-operative study of a range of social sciences and it is hoped that the book gives some idea of the interesting interconnections which can be made, and remain to be made, between social and spatial processes.
