ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of modernity from an historian's perspective, and looks at some of the key debates in social and cultural theory about the modern and postmodern, though not as an end in themselves. It examines the physical and the experiential dimensions of urban modernity, while attending also to the ways they persistently interact in historical and sociological analysis. In understanding the notion of modernity it is therefore helpful to trace its conceptualiszation in theoretical debates. Recent historical and sociological writing on urban modernity thus echoes many of the themes in the theoretical debate about the modern and the post-modern. The modern and the postmodern have become some of the most widely used and controversial categories in cultural theory. Not only is the city represented as modern in cultural terms, serving as the catalyst for that intensification and fragmentation of experience seen as characteristic of both modernity and modernism.
