This is a comprehensive guide to the latest scholarship in urban studies. Traditional models, radical interpretations and post-modern concerns are synthesized in a readable, accessible and evocative account of the central issues of contemporary urbanism and city life. The book provides an account of urban dynamics throughout the world and exemplifies the most revealing perspectives and current ideas on the city, urban economics, urban social structure and semiotics of the built environment.Urban geography is in desperate need of a textbook that characterizes the field of something much richer than that produced by the positivist epistemology of the 1960s. In its themes and organizational framework, in its approach and in its breadth of coverage, this book is set to fulfil that need.