Rob Shields

The “city” has become a favourite object of research in academia as well as the cultural mainstream and has spawned the areas of history, geography, sociology, literature and architecture. Rob Shields argues that the discipline has suffered however from its inability to clearly define the focus of its field and sketches out three important research areas for the field of urban studies: The social and economic sustainability of cities, future governance and administrative norms of cities, and finally virtual forms of urban life supported by new information and communication technologies.