This text examines the issues that directly affect cities and neighbourhoods. Since the 1960s, many architects and urban planners have reacted against the drab universalism and inhuman scale of modern architecture and urbanism, seeking instead to recover a sense of community and place. It is apparent to these architects and planners that something needs to be done to improve the physical landscape and the sense of desolation that it arouses. Efforts to do so have been grouped under the rubric postmodern urbanism . While this late-20th century quest for meaning has elicited nostalgia for cities of the past, it has not been acommpanied by a desire to relinquish technological innovations that raise the standard of living, or the pursuit of progress and modernity.