ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the period between the Age of Antiquity and the Renaissance as a phase of fundamental change in the ontological frameworks through which people made sense of the city and its politics. It makes clear, the nineteenth century, and the establishment of urbanism as a discipline, led to a further differentiation of such ways of urban knowing. The book discusses how in the post-World-War period, the rise of new urban conflicts and alternative imaginaries of the good city have led to far-reaching challenges for these ways of knowing. It also traces how urban knowledge processes unfold over time in distinct local contexts and details how they are co-productively entangled with the formation and governance of major urban-political issues and explores how such issues were tied to changing imaginings of the ‘good city’, and how they formed arenas of knowledge-based urban contestations.
