Examine the claim that cities have entered a 'postmodern' stage in their development.
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- 1640
- Submitted:
- Mon Jun 19 2006

... Examine the claim that cities have entered a 'postmodern' stage in their development. Postmodern, refers above all to the exhaustion of modernity (Lyon, 1994). It is beyond the scope of this paper to explain the phenomena of modernity, however modernism is from where postmodernism begins. It is a complicated set of ideas, it emerged as an area of academic study around the 1980's and is extremely difficult to define. It appears in a variety of disciplines such as art, communication, music, film, architecture to name a few and it is hard to determine where postmodernism embarks on. Regarding the city, postmodernism signifies a break with the modernist idea that planning and development should focus on large scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and urban planning (Harvey, 1989). This is the functionalist side of modernism, whereas postmodernism emphasises urban design including an array of architectural styles, soft edges, consumerism and an urban fabric which













