Professional Documents
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Urban World
Professor Hans Westlund
KTH Royal Institute of Technology,
Stockholm, Sweden
Henri Lefebvre (1970):
• ”Complete urbanization”
• Agriculture and villages = ”…integral part of
industrial production and consumption”
• ”…all part of the urban fabric…”
• ”…the only regions untouched by it are those
that are stagnant or dying, those that are
given over to ‘nature’.”
This lecture:
• Cities – from isolated islands to nodes in
global networks
• Theoretical consequences of the “complete
urbanization” for the urban-rural dichotomy,
that has been a fundament for our
understanding of human society
• The “Post-Urban World”
• Policy consequences of the “complete
urbanization”/”post-urban world”
Milestones in spatial theory
• Von Thünen’s isolated state (City-Hinterland)
• Central-place theory (City-Hinterland)
• (Industrial) Location theories (Transition
phase)
• The city-networks paradigm (Integrated City-
regions in networks, Hinterlands negligible) of
the knowledge economy
Why have theory changed focus?
• The transition from regional and national pre-
industrial and manufacturing-industrial
economies to a global knowledge economy
• Economies of the former epochs were based on
spatially bound resources; the knowledge
economy is not:
• A fundamental difference compared with the
former epochs. For the cities, this means that the
resources of the hinterlands have lost in relative
importance and the resources of other cities have
increased in importance.
The spatial-economic paradigms of
each period:
A. City and hinterland in the
pre-industrial economy