Urban Contract

<p>Today the increasing mobility of capital people and information has changed the space relations of urban societies. Contractual relations have increased in every field of social life: in the economic field but also in the political and in creative and scientific areas. Contracts are not only legal frameworks or economic aggregates of individuals but socially embedded forms.</p><p>The concept of urban contract proposed in this book combines the theoretical body of economic-juridical literature on the contract with that of historical-anthropological and socio-spatial literature on the city. Through a diverse range of ten city case studies <i>The Urban Contract</i> compares European North-American and Asian Urban Contracts. It concludes with a theoretical proposal for understanding the deep dialectical nature of Contract Cities: their reciprocity and competition their dual trend towards growth and decay their cyclical nature as agents of change and disruption of the social forms of urbanity.</p>