The Metropolis

The Metropolis replaces the Capital City as the primary form of urban habitation. Rather than marshalling the production of an entire territory to its own purposes, the Metropolis acts as a link in a global network of increasingly similar cities. The importance of local territory falls as industrial production and industrial agriculture replace local craft and farming. Trade between these areas is now a matter of exchanging goods conceived within their borders, produced outside them, but made exclusively for metropolitans. These cities become more dissimilar to their surrounding territories and more similar to each other as their allegiance turns toward a global Metropolitan regime. At the same time, increased migration into the Metropolis has also given rise to the growth of ethnic districts and communities. One no longer has to travel to a foreign country to see the Other. Every Metropolis has a Little Tokyo, a Chinatown, and an Orange County. These communities share a language of self-parody and constructed tradition that unites them from metropolis to metropolis. Even tourist goods and souvenirs are mass produced and distributed so that same T-shirts and shoes are available at all Chinatowns simultaneously. The result is that the Metropolis eventually undoes the territorializing drive of the nation-state, replacing it with an interconnected global economy.

Operating at a stage in which capital is still expanding, and in which the urban absorbs the rural, the Metropolis seeks to represent itself. Because of the increasing amount of information Metropolitan residents must process, this has to be done visually and typically results in the skyscraper. This form correlates with capital's drive to accumulation and results in a concentrated, vertical city of congestion.

The Metropolis is succeeded by the Megacity and the Postmetropolitan Realm.