The 21st century is termed 'The Age of Cities'. Decades of fast and intensive process of urbanization culminated in early 21st century: For the first time in human history, more than half of the world's population is living in cities. The process is advancing fast and the estimations are that world society is approaching a future state of ‘singularity’ in which “… the notion of where a city begins and ends physically is no longer relevant.” [1]. This process of urbanization is associated with a parallel process of economic, social and cultural globalization of world society.

The conjunction between globalization and urbanization entails the impression that by becoming more global and urban, the society of the world is becoming also more uniform; that the old cultural differences and socio-spatial tensions have gone as we are all experiencing the same global-urban reality. On the other hand, however, the process of globalization is associated with a parallel and complementary process of localization when the conjunction between the two gave rise to the notion of glocalization – a linguistic hybrid of globalization and localization. First presented in 1995 by Robertson [2], glocalization refers to the co-existence in contemporary everyday life of global universalizing tendencies together with local particularizing tendencies [3].

The suggestion here is that contemporary cities and urbanism are of no exception. The aim of this series of lectures is thus to explore the universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary cities. That is, the “glocalized” process of urbanization in which facing globalization, cities in different parts of the world take different forms and structures reflecting their local cultures, traditions and histories.