ABSTRACT
The last 20 years has commonly been characterised as the age of globalisation, neo-liberalism and post-modernity in a number of different studies highlighting the changes occurring in the spheres of economy, politics and culture in general. Neither architecture nor urban development has remained untouched by these changes. Some have pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the most significant event calling attention to the transformations that occurred in the ‘modern age’.1 It is for this reason that we have chosen that year to begin the final period of our analysis. However, it should be pointed out that there was a new economic cycle, with different dynamics and intensities, that has affected urban development in most cities in the western world in the wake of the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s.
