The term 'urban', like the term 'community', has become one of the potent legitimation symbols of our time. Urban (or its derivative 'inner city') prefaces the analysis of many of our contemporary ills and it provides a theoretical/ideological framework for policies and programmes devised by governments for the solution of these ills. As the urban context has been increasingly specified as the site of various crises in Western societies, an impetus has been given to all forms of urban study. There is, in other words, what Mellor (1977: p. 3) has called 'a lively sense of the urban problematic' which finds its expression in economics, political science, social administration, education, geography and history, and in the generic field of urban studies. It becomes apparent from the literature that there are very different ways of articulating or theorising the urban problematic. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex position it is perhaps possible, in ideal type form, to identify these differences around the organising constructs of problem, conflict and contradiction. The suggestion is made that much of the literature and discourse of the urban can be characterised from a sociological and urban education viewpoint in relation to these categories. Thus an emphasis may be discerned upon 'urban problems' which is underpinned by forms of functionalism and systems theory. In contrast to this, an emphasis upon 'urban conflicts' draws its inspiration ultimately from the work of Max Weber but more contemporaneously from the work of urban theorists such as Ray Pahl and John Rex. Challenging both of these constructs and the conventional wisdom of urban studies in general is the work of modern Marxists

such as David Harvey and Manuel Castells where the emphasis is upon 'urban contradictions' as indicative of the wider contradictions of capitalism.