Planetary Urbanization

The concept of planetary urbanization first originated in Lefebvre's book The Right to the City published in 1968, which introduced the concepts of the complete urbanization of society and urban society. In 1970, he formally introduced the concept of "planetary urbanization" in his book The Urban Revolution, arguing that the expansion of urbanization has led to the outward spread of urban functions and the fading of urban-rural boundaries, then the world will be integrated eventually into an unified system. Accordingly, the concept of city based on the industrial era is facing disintegration, and the city is no longer a fixed territory with boundaries, and the concept of city becomes relatively abstract. The epistemology of the city as a fixed spatial type or bounded spatial unit cannot explain the new spatial landscape shaped by the expansion of the city at the global scale, so planetary urbanization advocates the use of "process" thinking to understand the city.

Edited and translated by Zhang Yifei