ABSTRACT
Despite its title, this is not a book about cities. Rather, it is a book about urban theory, exploring the way that sociologists, planners, architects, economists, urbanists and (particularly) geographers have sought to make sense of the urban condition.As such, the primary aim of this book is to locate the concept of ‘the city’ within traditions of geographic and social thought, providing a basis for understanding its varying usages and meanings.This is by no means a straightforward task, as the city is many things: a spatial location, a political entity, an administrative unit, a place of work and play, a collection of dreams and nightmares, a mesh of social relations, an agglomeration of economic activity, and so forth. To isolate some characteristic of the city that might distinguish it from its nominal counterpart, the rural, is extremely difficult given this multiplicity of meaning.
