Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City

Urban Theory and the Urban Experience brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies and the often unacknowledged debt that empirical and theoretical perspectives on the city owe one another. From the foundations of modern urban theory to the writings of contemporary urban theorists such this book traces the key developments in the idea of the city over more than a century. Individual chapters explore investigative studies of the great metropolis to the contemporary urban research, along with alternative approaches to the industrial city, ranging from the Garden City Movement to the new urbanism. The volume also considers the impact of new information and communication technologies, and the growing trend towards disaggregated urban networks, all of which raise important questions about viability and physical and social identity of the conventional townscape.