ABSTRACT
The city is a place of work. People congregate in order to work together. And their capacity to work together brings people together to live. So work is at the core of social life. As work has become more and more specialised, and at the same time more densely interconnected, so cities have grown in size and complexity. Cities are fundamentally places where ideas, goods and services are produced and exchanged. The Latin word 'forum' originally meant both a place of public deliberation and a marketplace for goods. With so many cities occupied today with the 'knowledge economy' and the 'network society', the market and the forum are again beginning to merge.
