This book will change the way we understand cities. It provides readers with not only an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world but also overturns many common assumptions about urban structure.

Michael Dearis Professor of Geography and Director of the Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California. He was recently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. He received Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 1995. He is the author/editor of ten books including Rethinking Los Angeles (with H. Eric Schockman and Greg Hise, 1996) and Urban Latino Cultures-La vida latina en LA (with Gustavo Leclerc and Paul Villa, 1999)as well as over 100 journal articles and reports.