Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a chapter addressing the definitional question of what actually is a city. The advantage of reflecting some of the reality of the city's push into the suburb and even its envelopment of portions of the hinterland and rural terrain. "The mobility of the city", takes up our first instrument and explicates it as one of the primary tools of the exegesis of the city. Every city is directed in as well as out. Intra-city relations are just as self-evident in the urban milieu as inter-city relations. The city is the high point of human achievement, objectifying the most sophisticated knowledge in a physical landscape of extraordinary complexity, power, and splendor at the same time as it brings together social forces capable of the most amazing sociotechnical and political innovation.