Plastic Land in the Post-Industrial Era

In a narrow sense, this paper has a dual focus land and the settle- ment form generally referred to as the city. My specific concern is their relationship to each other and to the structural changes that define the transformation of the larger economy. Land at base is a production factoi' whose significance to economic activity is widely recognized. The city at base is a collection of land uses of relatively recent origin, resulting from the expanding capacity to produce a surplus and causing innumerable changes in the larger urban economy and society. In a broader sense, this paper will attempt to rescue both land and the city from the grips of a conventional wisdom that views their characteristics as fixed and their influence as static...