The Dynamics Of Cities: Ecological Determinism, Dualism And Chaos

The economy and geography of human population concentrations have been characterized throughout history by numerous dualisms and spatial disparities. Extreme poverty and equally extreme wealth coexist side by side. Are they connected or are they purely random?
"The Dynamics of Cities" addresses these questions, arguing that spatiotemporal interaction and locational comparative advantages are interlocked into a simple but rich code of evolution. Drawing on recorded evidence of a global scale and scanning the past quarter century, Dimitrios Dendrinos argues that the dynamics of the world's largest cities exhibit patterns in seeming chaos, but nonetheless ordered dualism.
In this informative and original study, Dendrinos arrives at an aggregate macro-ecological determinism governing the rise and fall of cities, industries, regions, and nations alike. He synthesizes a speculative theory of human behavior and hypothesizes that a broad range of socioeconomic dualisms and spatial disparities signify a dynamic instability in the evolution of societies and human settlements. The author's highly original approach suggests that simple macrodynamic processes guide the growth and decline of contemporary megacities, just as they have determined the space-time of cities of the past.