ABSTRACT
For most of us, cities are incredibly phantasmagorical. The same city at different times we can know and not know, love and hate, revere and revile, yearn to leave and ache to return to. It is not only in this subjective sense that the city continually changes. In an objective sense too the same city can rapidly transform itself, not least physically: morning smog followed by clear evening skies, parched land turning to mud slurries. In economic and social terms too, cities are continually in flux, one day with a dominant polluting employer, the next with five thousand more redundant workers. Nothing about the city is static: everything about the city is continually in change. Barbara Ward (1975, p. 39) went further than this, declaring that ‘the very word “settlement” is in some measure a contradiction. In many ways modern man is living with “unsettlement’”. Our places of work, recreation and residence all differ and change over time, so that in our assorted roles as residents, commuters, producers, consumers, migrants, leisure-seekers and tourists, we are always on the move within and between our cities, whilst the cities themselves continually change and develop in both form and function.
