ABSTRACT
Conventional definitions of “city,” “urban place,” or “metropolis” have led to conventional analyses of urban systems and urban-based social problems. Usually traceable to Wirth’s classic and highly plausible formulation of “numbers, density and heterogeneity,” there has been a continuing tendency, even in more recent formulations, e.g. to conceive of place quite apart from a crucial dimension of social structure: power and social class hierarchy. Consequently, sociological research based on the traditional definitions of what an urban place is has had very little relevance to the actual, day-to-day activities of those at the top of local power structure whose priorities set the limits within which decisions affecting land use, the public budget, and urban social life come to be made. It has not been very apparent from the scholarship of urban social science that land, the basic stuff of place, is a market commodity providing wealth and power, and that some very important people consequently take a keen interest in it. Thus, although there are extensive literatures on community power as well as on how to define and conceptualize a city or urban place, there are few notions available to link the two issues coherently, focusing on the urban settlement as a political economy.