This completes Ed Soja's trilogy on urban studies, which began with Postmodern Geographies and continued with Thirdspace. It is the first comprehensive text in the growing field of critical urban studies to deal with the dramatically restructured megacities that have emerged world-wide over the last half of the twentieth-century.

Edward W Soja is Professor of Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written extensively on urban social life, planning and theory. His previous books include Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso, 1989)and Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996).