What is a city?

Juval Portugali

Chapter 6 in The Second Urban Revolution, 2025, pp 165-184 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter opens Part II of the book, the aim of which is to create connections between the first and second urban revolutions. It does so by posing a seemingly trivial question: “What is a city?” It turns out that the answer to this question is not self-evident: since the 1950s, urban researchers have struggled with this question with no satisfactory answer. Chapter 6 searches for an answer to the failure to define what a city is, in the cognitive science domain of categorization. It shows that the various attempts to define what a city is assume that the city is a classical category, whereas in fact, it is what Wittgenstein has termed a family resemblance category, or more accurately, a space-time family resemblance category typified by properties of prototypicality and best exemplars. The chapter then connects this view of cities, firstly to Weber's notion of “ideal type,” to Alexander's notion of “a pattern language,” and to the SIRNIA model. Secondly, it discusses several peculiarities of the category city, and finally, it relates the above discussion to the question of “what is urbanism.”

Keywords: Family resemblance; Pattern language; Space syntax; Categorization; SIRNIA; Urbanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035350117
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