ABSTRACT
We are in the midst of the Third Urban Revolution. The first began over 6,000 years ago with the first cities in Mesopotamia. These new cities were less the result of an agricultural surplus and more the reflections of concentrated social power that organized sophisticated irrigation schemes and vast building projects. The first urban revolution, independently experienced in Africa, Asia and the Americas, was a new way of living in the world. The Second Urban Revolution began in the eighteenth century with the linkage between urbanization and industrialization that inaugurated the creation of the industrial city and unleashed unparalleled rates of urban growth and environmental transformation. We are currently in the Third Urban Revolution, a complex phenomenon that began in the middle of the twentieth century and is marked by a massive increase, in both absolute and relative terms, in urban populations, the development of megacities and the growth of giant metropolitan regions, global redistribution of economic activities as former manufacturing cities decline and new industrial cities emerge elsewhere. Services, especially advanced producer services, have become the cutting-edge of rapid urban economic development. Consequently, the global urban network is in transition. Urban landscapes are revalorized and devalorized at an often bewildering pace: central cities have characteristically become sites of new urban spectacle; inner cities are pockmarked by sites of gentrified renaissance as well as rampant poverty and criminality; inner suburbs show the first inklings of decline, exurban development continues apace as gated communities and mixed-use developments sprawl into the former countryside. We are in the throes of a revolution that we are only just beginning to see, name and theorize. The new lexicon which has emerged to describe cities – “post-modern”, “global”, “networked”, “hybrid”, “splintered” – offers some purchase on the rich complexity and deep contradictions of the Third Urban Revolution, but much remains to be said and done before we can make any sense of the new forms of urbanism which characterize the twenty-first century.84
