ABSTRACT
The paradigms which have informed the ‘traditional’ fragment of urban studies generally speaking have been rooted in an empiricist epistemology. As a result they have led to accounts of the development of particular cities or aspects of them that have been largely descriptive, a theoretical and non-cumulative. Methodologically these accounts have artificially abstracted the city from its societal context and consequently assumed that most, if not all, that was needed to explain urban development was somehow endogenous to the city and hence for analytic purposes the city could be treated as a closed system (Forrest et al., 1982). Fortunately, for urban studies, however, the fallacies of this ‘ontology of the urban’ have now been exposed, and in many arenas overturned. Urban studies has undergone a paradigm shift of revolutionary proportions (Lebas, 1982). Thanks to the intervention of Castells (1977, 1978, 1983a), Harvey (1973, 1978, 1982), Lefebvre (1976, 1979), Martins (1982), Lojkine (1976), Mingione (1981) and many others who have been influenced by them, it is no longer possible to understand the economic, social, political and spatial aspects of urban development in any intellectually serious way, except by means of a method which embeds the city in its wider structural context.
