“What is a city?” Is It Merely a Nonsense Question?
Keywords:
city, representation, physical dimensionAbstract
In the academic arena, the city has been variously defined depending on its particular socio-historical context, and according to a discursive power which dominates the space and time in which the city has been constructed.
The objective of this paper is to indicate that any definition of the city, in the final analysis, is only a “representation” of the city, or the “conceptualized city” which has been constructed in relation to a particular power-knowledge frame of the time. However, the city cannot exist only in a conceptual dimension. Beyond the conceptual dimension which is based deeply on the use of languages, the city must exist in a physical dimension also. A proper understanding of urban social problems will never happen if we turn a blind eye to this issue.
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