While many urban politics books cover economic, government, and housing issues throughout history, this book digs deeper, to investigate changes in urban settlements, political systems, work organizations, educational policies, views of human nature, and religious practices from the premodern to the postmodern. Those paradigmatic changes are then examined to ask important questions such as: What can local governments learn from premodernity in order to promote desirable developments and progressive trends? The reader is guided through progressive and regressive strategies as well as mainstream and critical social theory in order to find possible answers to these important questions.