ABSTRACT
Many contemporary works suggest that we are experiencing a victory of the 'urban' and a defeat of the 'city'. In this chapter, the author discusses seven principles to set up a more consistent way of considering urban spaces. These include: adopting a basic and universal definition of urbanness; distinguishing a priori urbanness from a posteriori urbanness and urban capital; distinguishing relative urbanness from absolute urbanness; distinguishing pedestrian metrics from automobile metrics; encompassing simultaneously territory and networks; designing a point-to-point measurement; and building ready-to-use indicators. Because of their European style urbanness, European cities remain the most productive spatial machines in the world. Conversely the Johannesburg model typically encompasses a kind of city where urbanness is everyday and everywhere challenged by its opposite. The basic idea of the dichotomic typology is that all components of relative urbanness are positively correlated with each other; largely embodied in actual cities.
