The territories of the metropolis, with its social
topographies, economic energies, and political machi-
neries, is once again on the theoretical and policy
agenda.This time the interest lies in the extended conur-
bations of the ‘city-region’, in the fading of city into
countryside, in the frontiers that trail into the horizon,
and in the vast blotches of sprawl that defy censusbound-
aries and categories. Of course, this is a resurgent rather
than wholly new interest. Urban historians have long
been interested in precisely such conurbations, be they
those of the feudal age where economic and political
identities of freedom and serfhood were embedded in
the localities of city and countryside; or those of early
20th-century social-democratic capitalism when there
was a lively imagination for managing the relationship
between city and countryside, an imagination that
today would possibly be named ‘sustainability’.求中文翻译。