ABSTRACT
The cultural and social characteristics of cities described in Part Two display an astonishing variety over time from the complex Black society W.E.B. Dubois documented in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward (p. 110), to the impersonal world of early-twentieth-century immigrant culture that formed the basis for Louis Wirth’s theory of urbanism as a way of life (p. 96), to the yuppie creative class enclaves that Richard Florida feels are important to advanced urban economies (p. 143). The size, density, spatial distribution of functions, and physical form of cities described in Part One on the evolution of cities ranged from Ur’s mudbrick walls and ziggurat (p. 31) to the marble agora of the Greek polis (p. 40); from the polluted slums of nineteenth-century Manchester (p. 46) to the high-tech research campuses, malls, and residential areas of present-day technoburbs (p. 75).
