ABSTRACT
The city produces forms without itself having any form. This sentence by Ernst Jünger, written in the 1930s, fits well into the contemporary Asian megalopolis, the American metropolis and the European city as well. Hence the circulation and exchange of meanings, sometimes in a perturbing way. Take the case of a city with 46% of the urban population poor or at risk of falling under the poverty line: Mumbai? no, New York.1 A city with 40% of the urban population living in illegal dwellings, only later on regularized by the municipality: Delhi? no, Rome.2 Or a city where 47% of the total number of migrants are highly educated (i.e. graduates and postgraduates): Boston? no, Bangalore.3 These few examples challenge our current conventional ideas and portrayals of planetary urbanization, calling for further research into what we term the urban ‘social contract’, the ways in which the urban populations of the world define their cohabitation. Clearly, the urban world is not monolithic, but multifaceted, and yet the traditional views of the global urban divide (North and South, East and West etc.) need fairly radical revision.
