What is a metropolis? II

The dialectical take:

"The disappearance of Nature -- the commodification of the countryside and the capitalization of agriculture itself all over the world -- now begins to sap its other term, the formerly urban. Where the world system today tends toward one enormous urban system -- tendentially ever more complete modernization promised that, which has however been ratified and delivered in an unexpected way by the communications revolution and its new technologies: a development of which the immediately physical visions, nightmares of the "sprawl" from Boston to Richmond, or the Japanese urban agglomeration, are the merest allegories -- the very conception of the city itself and the classically urban loses its significance and no longer seems to offer any precisely delimited objects of study, any specifically differentiated realities. Rather, the urban becomes the social in general, and both of them constitute and lose themselves in a global that is not really their opposite either (as it was in the older dispensation) but something like their outer reach, their prolongation into a new kind of infinity"

-Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 28-29.