ABSTRACT
However far away from the design studio planners and architects may be drawn by other imperatives of their practice, the geometry of settlement space — its topological and metric structure in the large and the small — remains central to thought on urban design. Dis tinctive spatial skills and esthetic criteria; the media of map, model and plan; the sociospatial reasoning of a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Le Corbusier; the micro-territorial phrasing of codes and regulations: all these have reproduced a space-centered tradition of planning and design that is relatively isolated from the mainstream of socioeconomic theory on the city. Geographers, environmental psy chologists and some urban sociologists have shared a similar the oretical isolation.
