ABSTRACT
The quantitative dimension of economic change most of us take to be so profound as to amount to qualitative change. It is a situation reminiscent of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the great figures of the emergent social sciences were trying to formulate appropriate ways of understanding then emerging organizations of production and their corresponding emerging geographic correlates, the great industrial cities. The changes were extraordinary and monstrous, and these scholars tried to epitomize them in theories which, however fusty they may seem today, are still taught as the theoretical basis of sociology and political economy: alienation, class consciousness, anomie, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The most basic transformation for urban economic planning has been the transition from the vision of Alfred Weber to that of his brother, Max. In the late 1970s there was a sea change in attitudes, epitomized politically by Reagan and Thatcher and among academics and business gurus by the rediscovery of Schumpeter.
