Urbanisation is one of the defining issues of our time, shaping a fast-changing world, with our urban economies and societies and urban places produced in the process itself, along with their sustainability and enabling potentials. However the ways we conceive urbanisation leaves a lot of this process extremely unclear. Urbanisation is more than the transition of people from rural to urban modes of production and ways of life. It is an historical process in which the urban world emerges as a tightly structured path-dependant but also non-linear process. The product of this process is a humanly constructed space, or layering of human spaces, that challenges the way we think not just of the city but also of our social grounding in it. Space syntax has gone part of the way to opening a path to our understanding of this process and space through its representations of urban fabrics and their centralities at a fine grain. However, other discourses on the city and urbanisation have considered much larger scales. Here, critical interpretations of Peter Taylor’s ‘world-city network’, sociotechnical systems and space syntax are brought together in order to propose an interpretation of the different spaces, scales and layers of urbanisation, and a model of urbanisation and central place formation that crosses these scale differences. This model can, it is suggested, help us construct strategies for more layered, sustainable and socially enabling urbanisation and central place development in the future.