ABSTRACT
It has been clear for some time that both urban development and the design professions concerned with urban development — architec ture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design — have been responding to a new and distinctive set of social, economic, demo graphic, cultural and political forces. At the root of this new context for the design professions and the built environment are structural changes that have been developing for several decades as the dy namics of capitalism have entered a ‘late’ or ‘advanced’ stage marked by a steady shift away from manufacturing employment towards service employment, an increasing dominance of big conglomerate corporations, and an internationalization of corporate activity. Meanwhile, these same dynamics have precipitated some important social transformations: the differentiation of the social order into complex class fractions and the creation of a ‘new’ petite bourgeoisie, for example. These social transformations, in turn, are being re produced in space through property relations which are articulated by the real estate sector, mediated by the design professions, and reflected and conditioned by the built environment (Gottdiener, 1985; Lefebvre, 1974).
