ABSTRACT
The explosion in the number of inventions at the end of the eighteenth century, the result of extensive scientific experimentation earlier in that century, sparked the transformation of a predominantly agricultural economy into an industrial one with its concomitant mass migration from rural areas to industrializing cities. This process provided unprecedentedly fertile conditions for the creation of ideal conceptions of the city as well as for large-scale urban transformations. This was the context for the development of an urban discourse characterized by a dialectic exchange between the realms of the ideal and the practical. This dialectic, the subject of this anthology, was played out in the large metropolitan areas of Europe which were the sites for the formation of modernity.
