ABSTRACT
Urbanization is rapidly accelerating, and extending ever more densely, if unevenly, across the earth’s surface. The combined demographic, economic, sociotechnological, material-metabolic and sociocultural processes of urbanization have resulted in the formation of a globalized network of spatially concentrated human settlements and infrastructural configurations in which major dimensions of modern capitalism are at once concentrated, reproduced and contested. This pattern of increasingly globalized urbanization contradicts earlier predictions, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, that the era
of urbanization was nearing its end due to new information technologies (such as the internet), declining transportation costs and new, increasingly dispersed patterns of human settlement. Despite these trends, all major indicators suggest that urbanization rates across the world economy are now higher and more rapid than ever before in human history.
