The fourth book in a new series which, as its title implies, offers a kind of introduction to a subject but written by a leading expert who is encouraged to give his own particular slant on it. As well as explaining just what urban studies involve, the book highlights such fundamental issues as the definition of the contemporary city and the development policies by which it is changed. A key element in the urbanistics debate is to establish that the city of today, as we experience it, is not simply a lesser version of the city of the past but represents a whole new entity, still hard to define and to distinguish from its recent and more distant prototypes.