ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a meeting between two important strands of contemporary social theory. The ascendance of the city and the urban seems to be based, broadly speaking, on two main planks. The urban also has its own intuitive appeal when considered as a modality, but this is a rather more difficult notion, in part because it is irreducibly qualitative. The question seems to gain in significance in the context of the peculiarities of ‘late’ urbanisation in Asia and the disproportionate importance of big cities there. In both Africa and Asia, the share of urban population is currently at about 37 per cent compared to all other continents where the share is above 70 per cent. Accounts of the decline of the rural usually turn out to be mostly about the decline of the village. It hardly needs emphasising that throughout the twentieth century, at any rate, the locus of socially significant discourse has been overwhelmingly urban.
