The urban revolution

Abstract

This chapter argues for joining urban mathematical models with critical urban social theory. It also argues that it is worthwhile to read the quantitative revolution through not only new geographical theories, the wider social context of the cold war or new technologies such as the computer, but through the objects of geographical inquiry. Today, urban geography is one of the central pillars of our discipline. Overall, early 20th-century German geography is more interested in rural places than in the industrialized and urbanized city. Bobek criticized urban geography for its focus on cities as part of a cultural landscape or as cultural landscapes in their own right, its focus on morphology and historical development. Urban geography after 1945 continues its functionalist agenda and people see a further growth of the field within the discipline. In Marxist terminology, one could argue that regional geography is not a paradigm for modern industrial capitalism.