ABSTRACT
Under the impact o f globalization, cities have been the venue for important morphological and social changes. As such, efforts to describe and theorize the contemporary city in order to address and understand the issues that those who ‘create and inhabit’ the city encounter are both timely and crucial. By observing that each city - despite being part o f an overall global dynamic - has its own specific local characteristics, Rachel Coutinho defends the impor tance of new methods of analysis for understanding the contemporary city.
