The knowledge, power, and social practices which emerged in 17th-century Europe. Modernity was not associated solely with ‘newness’, but also with beliefs in rationality and ‘progress’, and came to be seen as a central attribute of Europe, which the rest of the world was expected (or compelled) to adopt. ‘The substitution of new designs for old will be a progressive move, a new step up the ascending line of human development’ (Bauman in J. Krieger, ed. 2001; read the whole entry). Larsen (2006) Geografiska B 88, 3 sees Western modernity as characterized by the binary oppositions of self–other, nature–culture, and future–past. I. Wallerstein (2004) argues that modernity is concretely expressed as the modern world system. Claval (2007) Tijdschrift 98, 2 sees the large city as an expression of 19th-/20th-century modernity, while Taylor (2007) TIBG 32, 2 sees the subordination of cities to territorial states as the most important geographical attribute of modernity. Tomic and Trumper (2006) Antipode 38, 3, writing on Chile, find that the concept of cleanliness as an expression of the modernity claimed by neoliberalism for a small part of Chilean society comes ‘at a high human cost’: precarious labour under harsh conditions and low wages. Murphy (2006) AAAG 96, 1 argues that a core tenet of modernity is an abrupt break with the past, but D. Harvey (2003) argues against the ‘modernity as break’ thesis.