Already in the early 1990s, the historian Robert Fishman (on the history of urban form) wrote about how the contemporary city has radically broken with traditional urban spatial structures. It “lacks what gave shape and meaning to every urban form of the past: a dominant single core and definable boundaries”. And it has reached a scale which so far had been unimaginable: while the leading metropolitan centers of the last century, e.g. NY, London, Berlin spanned about a hundred square miles, the contemporary metropolis covers two to three thousand square miles and its boundaries are far from clear. It is this geographic expansion of the city into a “metropolitan form” or “to the metropolitan scale”, i.e. it is the metropolitan agglomeration, which has increasingly defined, in North American urban research since Jane Jacobs, the metropolitan region as the appropriate focus for analyzing urban developments.
Mayer, M., „Metropolitan Research in Transatlantic Perspective,“ CMS Working Paper Series No 002-2006.
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