Cities are economic entities. Their location, functioning, growth, decline, and internal structure are all heavily influenced by economic forces. This chapter draws from the fields of urban economics, economic geography, and regional science in order to present some core concepts of urban growth and change organized around three questions: Why are cities where they are? What drives urban growth and change? And how does a city grow across a landscape? Foundational concepts (e.g., first and second nature, competition between cities, agglomeration economies, density gradients, transport technology and urban form, the monocentric city model, nonmarket forces) are explained narratively and illustrated through examples from cities around the world. A key message is that the economic logic of urban development is constrained by geography, enabled by technology, and shaped by human institutions, including urban planning. The chapter emphasizes that the urban built environment at risk from hazards is a tangible accumulation of the city’s economic history.

Using Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the colonial city in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a starting point, this chapter argues that the very disjunctiveness of Manichean colonial urban forms is key for perceiving, analysing, and indicting the colonial system, as well as for imagining paths for decolonization. Moreover, understanding the city as a site of contestation and anticolonial desires allows us to rethink the role of the urban in world literature studies. In contrast to models that assume the city as a node that endows literary value, this chapter views the (post)colonial city as a crucible in which the critical energies of decolonization emerge, take literary expression, and circulate in new ways. The chapter examines three representative literary examples, all focusing on Asian metropolises: José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere; Kim Chi-ha’s Five Thieves (Ojŏk); and Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger. Respectively, they depict a racially-divided colonial capital at the end of the nineteenth century (Rizal’s Manila); a recently decolonized, post-civil war city under dictatorship (Kim’s Seoul); and a paradigmatic conurbation of twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism (Adiga’s Gurgaon).