Spreading Out the Fabric: Urban, Rural, Global

Abstract

Chapter 2 shifts focus to the urban fabric as it stretches out to regional and global spatial levels. The city’s relations to its surrounds — its hinterlands, farms, forests, coasts, rivers, waterways, towns and the encompassing nation state — constitute fragments of its fabric thought large, interconnected with the natural and social habitat from which and with which it is woven. The chapter proceeds with an account of this system along lines suggested most emphatically by Peter Taylor in World City Network. Drawing upon Taylor’s work, I nevertheless argue here for a global urban fabric in place of alternative vernaculars, in order to retain connotations of spontaneous and sporadic relations that bind cities together in suggestive as well as systematic ways.