ABSTRACT
A chorus of expert and popular commentary welcomes a golden era of human prospect. For the past half-decade, the United Nations (UN) has broadcast the message of a new urban ascendancy and the urban age has been declared. The bloodiest century in history gives way to an era of urban opportunity, but in a world unsettled by planetary-scale threats to natural and human orders. Ulrich Beck speaks of a ‘dialectics of modernity’, underlining the simultaneity of triumph and crisis in a world pervasively and continuously remade by capitalist modernisation. A parade of new popular literature noisily acclaims the arrival of the urban age. It springs not from the mainstream of contemporary urban scholarship, but new and non-traditional quarters, including business studies, journalism and consultancy. An urbanised humanity poses complex institutional challenges for a world remade in recent decades by neo-liberalism, and marked by the declining extent and confidence of state authority.
