ABSTRACT
What is a city? Does this word describe a contemporary reality, a human invention dating back several thousand years, or the eternal pursuit o f a fan tasy built space, both just and beautiful? And when we say city in Capetown or in Mumbai, cidade in Rio de Janeiro, ciudad in Medellin, citta in Naples or ville in Lyon, are we talking about the same reality? This is precisely the ques tion. The present book is bom o f the aspiration of researchers from the Labo ratory o f Urban Sociology (LASUR), based at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL/Swiss Federal Institute o f Technology Lausanne) to answer these questions and to think, in an interdisciplinary way, about the future of contemporary cities.
