ABSTRACT
At the beginning of this century, there were little more than a dozen or so cities in the world with more than a million people. They were all in the advanced capitalist countries and London, by far the largest of them, had just under 7 million. The twentieth century has been the century of urbanisation. There has been a massive reorganisation of the world's population, of its political and its institutional structures and of the very ecology of the earth. The crucial categories seem to be those of modernisation, modernity, post-modernity, capitalist and industrial society. There is a well-known alternative to the absolute view of space/time: that is, the relative view attributed mainly to Albert Einstein and worked on by others since. Physical distance is different from distance measured in terms of the cost or time taken to move between points and in the last two cases the space described is not necessarily Euclidean.
