ABSTRACT
This chapter charts some of the key historical trends in the development of cities and urban studies, with two aims in mind. The first aim is to understand the significance of cities for the social and spatial construction of gender. Evidence of the variety and complexity of urban settlement types and the multiple processes of urbanisation helps explain the rationale and resilience of a discipline called ‘urban studies’ and why opinions and theories compete to explain the complex patterns of urbanisation observed. For this purpose we introduce in the first part of the chapter an overview of urban transformations spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This represents a partial selection from a whole continuum of non-rural settlement types found across the globe.
