Wirth (1938, Am. J. Soc.) used this term to discuss a way of life associated with urban dwelling (suggesting that urban dwellers follow a distinctly different way of life from rural dwellers). Sheppard (2013) Urb. Geog. 34, 7, 893 notes that ‘urbanism’ is seen as ‘a hallmark of modernism, progress, development and the metropole—the opposite of provincialism’.

Kern (2007) Urb. Geog. 28, 7 defines neoliberal urbanism as the production of self-governing, consumption-oriented, autonomous urban citizens. Wilson (2008) Urb. Geog. 29, 3 finds that a key underpinning of neoliberal urbanism is ‘the widespread acceptance of distinctive, simple sensibilities about people, places, and processes that underpin extensions of neoliberalism into urban redevelopment’. These include the beliefs that hierarchical power arrangements in cities and beyond are natural; that power arrangements reflect differences in people’s levels of aspirations, abilities, and desires to determine their own destinies; and that human nature is prone to conflict spurred by the ‘naturalness’ of racial, ethnic, and class differences. This is an illuminating paper. See Ward (2003) Area 35, 2 on entrepreneurial urbanism.

However, it is clear from the literature that urbanism can mean urbanization in North America: E. Talen (2005) identifies four traditions in the United States: incrementalism, the urban plan-making culture, planned communities, and regionalism (the last two outside the existing infrastructure of the city). Talen suggests that new urbanists, ‘unlike practitioners of past planning movements’, are attempting to decipher and implement the ‘successes’ of these four.