The Í€˜urban ageÍ€™ in question

Abstract

Foreboding declarations about contemporary urban trends pervade early 21st century academic, political and journalistic discourse.Í  Among the most widely recited is the claim that we now live in an Í€œurban ageÍ€ because, for the first time in human history, more than half the worldÍ€™s population today purportedly lives within cities.Í  Across otherwise diverse discursive, ideological and locational contexts, the urban age thesis has become a form of doxic common sense around which questions regarding the contemporary global urban condition are framed.Í  This article argues that, despite its long history and its increasingly widespread influence, the urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize world urbanization patterns:Í  it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception).Í  This critique is framed against the background of postwar attempts to measure the worldÍ€™s urban population, whose main methodological and theoretical conundrums remain fundamentally unresolved in early 21st century urban age discourse.Í  The article concludes by outlining a series of methodological perspectives for an alternative understanding of the contemporary global urban condition.