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What is a City?

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Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Achille C. Varzi

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  1. Achille C. Varzi
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Correspondence to Achille C. Varzi.

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Varzi, A.C. What is a City?. Topoi 40, 399–408 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09647-4

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