Topoi (2021) 40:399–408

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09647-4

What is a City?
Achille C. Varzi1

Published online: 27 April 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
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 vin-
dicate 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.

Keywords City · Urbanization · Identity · Process · Persistence through change · Four-dimensionalism

1 Introduction: A Simple Question
The question I want to address is a simple one. I have put it
in four short words: What is a city? But, of course, that the
question is simple does not mean the answer is going to be
easy. In a way, we all know what we are talking about when
we speak of Rome, or Beijing, or New York, Kinshasa, Syd-
ney, Mexico City, etc. On reflection, however, it appears that
our words are rushing too swiftly over their referents. We
are speaking of cities; but what does that mean? What sort
This paper is based on a talk with the same title delivered at the
Philosophy of the City conference held at Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana Iztapalapa, Mexico City, in December 2014.
I am thankful to the organizer of the conference, Shane Epting,
for inviting me to collect my thoughts on the topic and to the
conference participants for their constructive feedback. A version
of the paper was also presented at a “Philosophy of the City” panel
organized by Michael Menser at the Graduate Center for Worker
Education of Brooklyn College, New York, in April 2015, where
I also benefited from the comments of the audience. The present
version has been edited for publication and has further benefited
from the reports of two anonymous Topoi referees, but retains the
informal style of the original talks.
* Achille C. Varzi
achille.varzi@columbia.edu
1
Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York,
NY 10027, USA
of thing are they? No one would be satisfied with the kind
of answer we may find if we look up a dictionary definition.
Yet, what are the alternatives?
Let me say from the start that I am not asking for answers
aiming to capture the full multifunctional and multilayer
complexity of cities. Surely that is the task of a good theory
of cities, the sort of theory that we need in order to engage
in responsible policy making and that has been the aim of
so many efforts throughout history—from Plato’s Repub-
lic to Thomas More’s Utopia to the numerous theoretical
frameworks developed by contemporary philosophers and
social scientists under the pressing need for new paradigms
of urban planning, development, and sustainability. We des-
perately need theories of this sort. But they all presuppose
that we have at least a preliminary grasp of what they are
about, and that is what I am looking for. We can hardly theo-
rize on the multifaceted dimensions of cities unless we know
what cities are. In particular, that means I am not looking for
answers that proceed from a formal distinction between the
physical, material dimension of a city and its sociological
dimensions, as if cities were a peculiar Cartesian mixture of
body and soul, of res extensa and res cogitans (or perhaps
res agitans). I do appreciate that this may seem a natural
way to proceed, and in many ways I sympathize with the
underlying motivations. As Derrida once put it, the ques-
tion “What is a city?” tends to exhibit a “melancholic or

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400
eschatological allure” (1992, p. 45) that is indeed reminis-
cent of the mind–body problem. But that is not to say that
the dualist tension should be built into the answer. It may
be part of the theoretical framework with which we even-
tually try to explain things and recommend solutions; yet
the framework goes beyond the question itself (and might
even be compatible with different answers, just as Cartesian
dualism is compatible with different ways of answering the
question, “What is a person?”).
One of the most classical essays devoted to our topic—
Lewis Mumford’s 1937 article with exactly our title, based
on a talk delivered to an audience of urban planners—does
just that. For Mumford, there is the city as a “purely physi-
cal fact”, as he calls it, and there is the city as a “social
institution”. And it is the latter that matters:
Most of our housing and city planning has been
handicapped because those who have undertaken the
work have had no clear notion of the social functions
of the city. They sought to derive these functions
from a cursory survey of the activities and interests
of the contemporary urban scene. And they did not,
apparently, suspect that there might be gross defi-
ciencies, misdirected efforts, mistaken expenditures
here that would not be set straight by merely building
sanitary tenements or straightening out and widening
irregular streets. (Mumford 1937, p. 59)
There is much to learn in these words. Mumford grew up
in Brooklyn at a time when urban civilization was reaching
unprecedented levels and proportions. The relationship of
the city with the environment and with the condition of
human community were beginning to emerge as pressing
issues over and above matters of architectural engineering
and economic function. It goes to Mumford’s credit that
he emphasized those issues; the city as a social institu-
tion was crying for recognition. Indeed, Mumford went a
long way towards offering a passionate but sophisticated
explanation of the city’s “total experience of life” (1961,
p. 117). His powerful idea was that we should think of
the city, understood as a social institution, as a “theater
of social action”, a theater filled with “collective drama”
(1937, p. 59).
The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the
theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city
as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are
focused, and work out, through conflicting and coop-
erating personalities, events, groups, into more signifi-
cant culminations. […] The physical organization of
the city may deflate this drama or make it frustrate; or
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A. C. Varzi
it may, through the deliberate efforts of art, politics,
and education, make the drama more richly significant,
as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines
the gestures of the actors and the action of the play.
(ibid.)
This is all very inspiring, and Mumford’s essay is rightly
regarded as a benchmark of modern urban studies. None-
theless it betrays exactly the sort of dualism between the
physical and the social that I want to resist. It’s not that I am
opposed to it; I just think it goes too far. I am interested in
the question “What is a city?” insofar as it can and ought to
be answered before we embark in such distinctions, before
we begin to differentiate between the physical dimension
from the social one.
I feel the same about other popular ways of address-
ing the question by emphasizing the multilayer complex-
ity—physical, social, economic, political, ecological, and
environmental—of cities. There is by now a large literature
on what have come to be known as operational definitions
(see e.g. Timberlake 2010; Marcotullio and Solecki 2013;
Uchiyama and Mori 2017), and while there is no consensus
on the underlying criteria, it is generally agreed that such
definitions are crucially needed when it comes to analyzing
sustainability indicators for policy making and are therefore
of great practical relevance. I agree. But here I am not look-
ing for a useful definition; my concern is with the nature of
the definiendum.
If you like, the way I want to understand the question is so
basic as to qualify as strictly metaphysical. I said that when
we speak of Rome, Beijing, New York, etc., our words are
rushing too swiftly over their referents. Well, what kind of
referents? How are they supposed to differ from other things
we often name or talk about, such as people or books or stars
or rivers? That’s my question. I suppose this much is clear:
when we use city names, our words refer in each case to a
huge conglomerate with lots of houses, churches, skyscrap-
ers, theaters, schools, shops, factories, bridges, stadiums,
parks, railway stations, and so on, along with lots of people
living and working in those buildings and engaging in all
sorts of private and public activities (again: arts, politics,
economics, education, etc.). However, those are just the
parts. What is it that makes those parts into a whole—that
very special kind of whole that we call ‘Rome’, ‘Beijing’,
‘New York’, etc.? What do such wholes have in common
and how do they behave, given that they have the parts they
have? To put it in traditional metaphysical jargon, what are
the identity conditions of such things? We talk a lot about
the sense of identity that comes with our belonging to some
city or other. But what are the identity conditions of the cit-
ies themselves, synchronically and diachronically?
What is a City? 401
2 Beyond the Metaphors
On this understanding of the question, it is tempting to begin
by saying that cities are complex systems with plenty of
emerging properties, identity being one. Indeed, over the
years cities have, in this sense, been compared to just any
complex system—from bazaars (Weber 1921) to river net-
works (Rodríguez-Iturbe and Rinaldo 1997); from beehives
and other insect colonies, buzzing constantly but self-regu-
lated (Langer 1958; Ramírez 1998), to stars, attracting and
compressing matter and burning brighter and faster the big-
ger they are (Bettencourt 2013); from machines, so big that
we cannot fully understand how they work (Amin and Thrift
2002), to self-reproducing fractals (Frankhauser 1994), cel-
lular automata (Batty 2005), brains (Changizi and Destefano
2010), and more. Perhaps the most popular metaphor is that
of the city as an ecosystem, with its peculiar interaction of
biotic and abiotic components resulting in creative cycling
of matter and flow of money (Douglas 1981; Parlange 1998;
Newman and Jennings 2008, Alberti 2016), money flow,
in turn, being compared to energy flow (Odum 1971) or
to nutrient circulation (Boulding 1962). And, of course,
there is a long tradition of authors comparing cities to liv-
ing organisms, whose health and growth depends on their
internal organization as well as on the external environment
in which they are hosted (Geddes 1915; Jacobs 1961; Bacon
1967; Miller 1978). Already in 1942, five years after the
publication of Mumford’s article, it was suggested that “city
planning has become obsolete” and “in its place must be
substituted urban biology” (Sert 1942, p. 4).
All of these are beautiful, penetrating metaphors. But that
is what they are—metaphors. And they all go wide on some
important feature or other of cities. For example, the thought
that cities are living organisms is as compelling as it has
become popular. There is a clear sense in which cities seem
to have some sort of “metabolism” (Wolman 1965), some
complicated set of life-sustaining transformations. A city
breathes, eats, uses power, wakes up at dawn and sleeps dur-
ing the night (with the possible exception of the Big Apple).
The analogy is robust. Yet it neglects a crucial detail. Living
organisms are, strictly speaking, entities that come to an end.
All living creatures, from mammals to starfish to bacteria
and protozoans, die. But cities? One of the most remark-
able things about cities (as opposed to villages and small
towns) is precisely that they rarely seem to die, save in the
dreary sense described in Jane Jacobs’s classic book, The
Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). There are
notable exceptions, such as Ur and Troy, along with Leptis
Magna, Machu Picchu, Vilcabamba, Chichen Itza, Cahokia,
and a few others (perhaps also Ai, El Dorado, or Iram of the
Pillars, if they existed at all). Cities are not immortal. And
yet, as Grotius famously put it in the second book of De
jure belli ac pacis, “they might possibly prove so” (2005,
p. 665), and modern cities appear to be on the right track.
Think of San Francisco, which was leveled by an earthquake
of huge intensity; it came back immediately. Think of Banda
Aceh, which was hit by a tsunami of unbelievable power;
it is still there. Or think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We
dropped nuclear bombs on those cities. The aftermath pho-
tos are horrifying: all those buildings reduced to rubble, all
those people vaporized. A devastating tragedy of incom-
prehensible scale. Yet the cities survived. Everything was
rebuilt—homes, schools, temples, bridges, theaters. Ruins
turned into memorials. And today Hiroshima and Nagasaki
have larger populations than in 1945, standing among the
strongest examples of perseverance and peace that we have.
More importantly, it seems to me that those popular
metaphors don’t quite get to the hearth, to the mystery,
to what makes cities so special. Here is what makes them
mysterious and special: the more we get used to being
citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to iden-
tify ourselves with a city. It is as though we need to have
some roots connecting us—materially connecting us—to
a city, to its neighborhoods, its colors and odors, its char-
acteristic noise, its skyline. And this need, along with the
sense of relief that comes with its fulfillment, is in no way
distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us
changes continuously. Everything changes: new buildings
rise, old ones are taken down, new restaurants open, old
ones close, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures,
two-way streets become one-way, downtown areas are
pedestrianized, old neighborhoods get gentrified, etc.
Compared to the tragic events in San Francisco and Banda
Aceh, or to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all
this change is much more gradual and less dramatic. But
change it is. And amidst the change, our cities continue to
be. Everything is in flux. But amidst the flux—amidst this
liquid modernity—our cities remain something solid, the
most solid thing we can latch onto.
I am aware that not everyone feels this need to the same
degree. Nonetheless it is precisely this solidity, I think, that
explains the success of the city, today as throughout his-
tory. And its drawing power appears to be stronger and more
widespread than ever. The second-last edition of the State
of the World’s Cities report by the United Nations Human
Settlements Programme opens with a statement that leaves
no room for argument:
The world is inexorably becoming urban. By 2030 all
developing regions, including Asia and Africa, will
have more people living in urban than rural areas. In
the next 20 years, Homo sapiens, “the wise human”,
will become Homo sapiens urbanus in virtually all
regions of the planet. (UN-Habitat 2008, p. viii)
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402
No doubt a major reason for the phenomenon is that peo-
ple move into cities with the hope to find good jobs and
pursue their professional ambitions. Moreover, in a city
one can participate in public events of all kinds and exer-
cise duties and rights. One can cultivate societal values and
get access to all sorts of cultural resources and all forms
of riches or well-being. I know of people who live in New
York City just because they can go to the opera whenever
they want. But then, again, today there are lots of e-jobs that
would allow us to work from a nice cottage in the country-
side using the internet. There is e-commerce, e-business,
e-education, e-society, and we can watch sport, concerts, and
even operas in streaming. No, deep down I really think we
need and strive for the solidity of our cities. The software is
not enough; we need the hardware. And so we find ourselves
caught in the paradoxical situation I alluded to: as we get
more and more used to being citizens of the world, we feel
an increasing need to identify ourselves with a city. Horace’s
slave, in the Satires, made the point vividly:
In Rome you yearn to be in the country, in the country
you praise the distant city to the stars without a sec-
ond’s thought. (2011, p. 56)
And yet this isn’t even the real paradox. The real para-
dox is the one I mentioned next, namely, that the solidity
of the city goes hand in hand with its being relentlessly in
flux. Year after year, day after day, our cities are constantly
transforming. Building after building, the parts keep chang-
ing; how can the wholes remain the same? Cities seem to
vindicate Heraclitus’s law:
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 ever differ-
ent, but numerically self-identical. That is why cities don’t
seem to die: they change, yet they survive the change. How
is that possible?
3 The City of Bricks, the City of Marble
Let us focus on a more streamlined formulation of the puz-
zle. The Roman historian Suetonius gives us a good example
in the second book of De vita Caesarum. With reference
to Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire and its first
emperor, from 27 BCE until his death in 14 CE, Suetonius
writes:
Aware that the city was architecturally unworthy of her
position as the capital of the Roman Empire, besides
being vulnerable to fire and river floods, Augustus
so improved her appearance that he could justifi-
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A. C. Varzi
ably boast: “I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her
clothed in marble.” (1979, p. 61)
There is a certain amount of bragging in Augustus’s
words, and perhaps Suetonius reading is too literal. Cassius
Dio, in his Historia romana (the other classical source we
have), actually says that Augustus was not referring literally
to “the appearance of the city” but rather, figuratively, to
“the strength of the empire” (1987, p. 245), in which case
we would simply be dealing with a slogan of imperial rheto-
ric. Still, it is a fact that Augustus himself put considerable
emphasis on his actual building program in the Res Gestae,
providing a detailed list of the temples, theaters, aqueducts,
etc. that he built or rebuilt during his long reign (2009, pp.
78–81), so Suetonius’s literal reading cannot be entirely off
target. And on that reading, the puzzle emerges sharply: how
can the old city and the new city be the selfsame thing—
Rome—if one is built of bricks and the other clothed in
marble? We know from Frege (1892) that two descriptions
may have the same referent even when their meanings dif-
fer, as with ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’. That’s
because one and the same entity may satisfy both properties,
being visible in the morning and being visible in the even-
ing. But ‘built of bricks’ and ‘clothed in marble’ are meant to
express mutually exclusive properties. By Leibniz’s law, if x
and y enjoy distinct properties, then x and y must be distinct,
too. And if they are numerically distinct, why does Augustus
speak of the city of bricks and the city of marble as though
they were one and the same? How can Suetonius speak of
the capital of the Roman Empire?
One popular answer is that Augustus and Suetonius were
simply wrong. Or rather, they were speaking loosely. One
may speak of the city of bricks and the city of marble as
though they were one thing, but strictly speaking they were
not. Leibniz’s law meets Heraclitus’s. A clear and detailed
formulation of this view may be found in the Port-Royal
Logique, the influential textbook published anonymously in
1662 by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. Here is what
they say:
Augustus said that he found the city of Rome made
of brick and left it made of marble. Similarly, we say
about a city, a house, or a church, that it was destroyed
at a certain time and rebuilt at another. So which Rome
was once made of brick and another time made of mar-
ble? Which cities, houses, or churches were destroyed
at one time and rebuilt at another? Was the Rome made
of brick the same as the Rome made of marble? No,
but this does not prevent the mind from forming a cer-
tain confused idea of Rome to which it attributes these
two qualities, namely being made of brick at one time
and of marble at another. When we subsequently form
propositions about it and say, for example, that Rome
which was made of brick before Augustus was made of
What is a City? 403
marble when he died, the word ‘Rome’, which appears
to be only one subject, nonetheless indicates two really
distinct subjects, but united under one confused idea
of ‘Rome’, which keeps the mind from recognizing
the difference between these subjects. (1996, p. 112)
This account is reminiscent of what David Hume would
say about identity in general. For Hume, there is no ques-
tion that our everyday interaction with the world of ordi-
nary experience is guided by the thought that things persist
through change. Bananas ripen, houses deteriorate, people
lose hairs and acquire new body cells. In this world of flux,
persisting objects are the only anchor we have. And yet—
says Hume—the thought of their persistence may well be a
delusion. The identity relation applies in its strictest sense
only to constant and unchangeable objects, and it is only
“the smooth passage of the imagination” along the ideas of
resembling perceptions that makes us ascribe identity even
to distinct or interrupted objects. It is our propensity to unite
broken appearances of resembling perceptions that produces
the “fiction of a continued existence”. As he wrote in the first
book of the Treatise:
That action of the imagination, by which we consider
the uninterrupted and invariable object, and that by
which we reflect on the succession of related objects,
are almost the same to the feeling […] The relation
facilitates the transition of the mind from one object
to another, and renders its passage as smooth as if it
contemplated one continued object. This resemblance
is the cause of the confusion and mistake, and makes
us substitute the notion of identity instead of that of
related objects. (2000, p. 166)
Ditto for our own personal identity, where again Hume is
explicit in using the language of “fiction”:
The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man,
is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that
which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It
cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must pro-
ceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like
objects. (p. 169)
Now, Hume’s view on such matters was as radical as a
view can be, and I think Kant was right in pointing out that it
is on the verge of incoherence. That was the beginning of the
transcendental deduction of the categories in the Critique of
Pure Reason: if the diachronic identity of the things around
us is a fiction, if it is merely a byproduct of the unifying
function of our intellect, doesn’t it follow that at least we
must persist in a strict and literal sense in order to experience
the fiction and implement the unification?
The I think must be able to accompany all my repre-
sentations; for otherwise something would be repre-
sented in me that could not be thought at all, which is
as much as to say that the representation would either
be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me.
(1998, pp. B131–B132)
Still, one need not accept Hume’s general views on
identity to appreciate the point of the Port Royal logicians.
Never mind people—or ordinary objects like houses and
bananas. When it comes to such multiplex creatures as cit-
ies, the idea that their persistence through time is in some
sense fictitious does seem plausible. After all, we are con-
fused about their identity conditions; that is precisely why
we asked the question in the first place, what is a city? It
might be that the Rome of bricks and the Rome of mar-
ble are really two things, two cities united only under the
confused idea of Rome—perhaps the confused propaganda
idea of Roma Caput Mundi—which prevents the mind from
perceiving and acknowledging their distinction. Echoing
Hume, Thomas Reid actually said that when it comes to a
changeable object, it retains the same name and we consider
it as the same thing “because language could not afford
a different name for every different state” (2002, p. 266).
Perhaps that is still too radical a view to hold generally, but
cities would certainly fit the bill. We simply cannot afford
changing our city names all the time. We cannot afford
updating our maps and atlases every other day. Besides,
cities do not—in the ordinary sense of the term—move. The
Rome of bricks and the Rome of marble were (roughly) in
the same place, so it was natural to use the same name for
both. It comes natural to use that same name for the Rome
of today and it would seem natural to continue doing so
in the future. No wonder cities strike us as immortal. But
might it not be that really this is just a consequence of our
lexical and semantic limitations?
Another way of putting this thought, borrowing a termi-
nology that goes back to Abelard and the medieval nomi-
nalists, but that made its way into contemporary philosophy
mainly through the work of Chisholm (1976), is that cit-
ies that change, like Rome, are mere entia successiva. At
different times, different entities—different aggregates of
buildings, bridges, roads, people, etc.—would take turn in
doing duty for the referent of ‘Rome’. They would do duty
for Rome much like different players at different times do
duty for one and the same team, say the NY Yankees, or like
different people at the stadium do duty for something we
like to call the “wave”. Strictly speaking, the movement of
wave is an illusion; it’s just a crowd of galvanized fans who
jump up and down at successive times and places. (Think
also of a film, or a cartoon movie: different frozen pictures
follow one another on the screen in such a way as to give us
the impression of a unitary movement. But an impression
it is. In reality there is just a series of separate snapshots in
rapid succession.)
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404
If things were so, however, then the solidity of the city
I was talking about would also be fictitious. Indeed, there
would be no solidity at all, no genuine ontological glue hold-
ing things together—hence nothing real to latch onto. The
continued unity of the whole would lie entirely in our cogni-
tive and social practices. It would be a mere projection of the
mind, a product of our confused worldmaking, the upshot of
an individual and collective game of pretense that makes us
treat different things as though they were the same. And if it
is just a game of pretense, whence the pull? Why do we feel
so attracted to the fiction, to the point of gradually turning
Homo sapiens into Homo sapiens urbanus?
4 The Missing Glue
So much for the popular picture. Since it leaves us wonder-
ing, I think we better ponder what alternatives there might
be, or else we are left with a problem that, on the face of it,
is far more disturbing and consequential than a petty philo-
sophical puzzle.
Now, one option is implicit in the analysis we offered.
There seems to be no “ontological glue” holding things
together, hence no solidity. But perhaps this conclusion
can be resisted. Appearances notwithstanding, there may
be something that persist, strictly and literally, beneath the
flux. After all, change is a widespread phenomenon, and in
many cases we are inclined to reject the factionalist picture
precisely that way. In our own case—persons—the glue may
be some sort of Kantian “I think”; in other cases, it may
be some different sort of thing. On a broadly Aristotelian
metaphysics, for instance, the glue would generally be an
underlying individual “substance”, which in the course of
time may acquire different and even exclusive “accidental”
properties without ceasing to be. In Aristotle’s own words,
from Book I of the Physics:
One can gather from surveying the various cases of
becoming in the way we are describing that there must
always be an underlying something, namely that which
becomes, and that this, though always one numerically,
in form at least is not one. (1984, p. 324)
Similarly, on a broadly empiricist metaphysics, the glue
would be an enduring “bare particular” (Locke’s “I-know-
not-what”, as he calls it in the second book of the Essay,
1975, p. 297) to which belong and in which subsist all the
properties of the changing object. While such metaphys-
ics have been developed with an eye to ordinary living and
material bodies, they can in principle be extended to human
artifacts as well, as with the classic puzzle of the ship of
Theseus reported in Plutarch’s Lives (1960, p. 29). The ship
would survive the replacement of all its parts because the
underlying substance would endure self-identical throughout
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A. C. Varzi
the process, at least so long as the process proceeds gradu-
ally enough. Cities are not ships. But to the extent that they
may be conceived along similar lines—as the Port Royal
narrative may suggest—the same account would apply. Far
from saying that Augustus and Suetonius were mistaken in
identifying the city of bricks and the city of marble, one
could insist that they were right, strictly and literally. They
were right insofar as the identity and persistence condi-
tions of Rome through the years of Augustus’ rule would be
grounded in those of the underlying enduring substratum.
Alas, I am afraid this is more wishful thinking than a
serious option. This sort of metaphysics may have explana-
tory force in the case of ordinary living and material bod-
ies. It might even be good for ships. But cities? Look at the
frenzy all around you—the buildings, the people, everything.
Where is the magic glue? I appreciate that when it comes to
our city, the city with which we identify, the theory seems
fitting. Unlike the cities we visit, in our city we seem to feel
the presence of a substratum, a glue that turns the flux into
a solid, persisting unity. We feel it so strongly that when we
say “I am a Roman”, “I am a New Yorker”, etc. we somehow
feel the effect of the glue on ourselves. We may also like the
rhetoric, as with Cicero’s “Civis romanus sum” (1935, p.
652, the source of Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”, 1964,
p. 524). Yet our feelings only say something about us. Our
cities seem genuinely connected to the past and oriented
toward the future because they are, as Andrew Light notes,
“physical manifestations of our values and priorities” (2003,
p. 44). The glue is in our heads. Perhaps it is in our hearts
or deeper inside. But it isn’t out there, and postulating its
existence does not vindicate the alluring solidity of cities; it
merely speaks to our need thereof.
5 Cities as Processes
There is, however, a different option. It may call for some
rethinking. But I believe it delivers a better picture, a picture
that does justice to the Port Royal intuition without thereby
destroying the internal unity of our cities along with their
solidity.
Consider again Heraclitus’s river. Commenting on the
deep puzzle that it raises, Willard V. O. Quine wrote:
The truth is that you can bathe in the same river twice,
but not in the same river-stages. You can bathe in two
river-stages which are stages of the same river, and this
is what constitutes bathing in the same river twice. A
river is a process through time, and the river-stages are
its momentary parts. Identification of the river bathed
in once with the river bathed in again is just what
determines our subject-matter to be a river process as
opposed to a river stage. (1950aa, p. 621)
What is a City? 405
In other words, the puzzle would not stem from a clash of
intuitions concerning the laws of identity. It would stem
from a mistaken conception of the river, which makes us
think that in order for us to step twice into its waters, the
river as a whole—the selfsame whole—must be there twice.
This is indeed the ordinary conception, which is based on
the belief that persisting things are three-dimensional enti-
ties that extend in space but endure in time—entities that
persist by being wholly present at each time at which they
exist. Perhaps that is true of some entities, and if Kant is
right it must be true of us. But a river? Why should we think
of a river as an enduring object? A river flows. There is a
river where there is a flowing of water. Perhaps the river is
the flowing. And if that is what it is, then Heraclitus was
wrong. Just as we never step into the entire spatial extent of
the river, but only into this or that spatial part, so we never
step into its entire temporal extent, but only into this or that
temporal part (or “stage”). Generally speaking, we step into
a river by stepping into one of its spatiotemporal parts. And
if we want to step twice, we can do so: we can step into two
river-parts, two different spatiotemporal parts of the same
spatiotemporal whole.
Now, Quine didn’t think this analysis applies exclusively
to flowing rivers. For him, the same is true of everything, at
least every physical thing. As he wrote elsewhere:
A physical thing—whether a river or a human body
or a stone—is at any one moment a sum of simultane-
ous momentary states of spatially scattered atoms or
other small physical constituents. Now just as the thing
at a moment is a sum of these spatially small parts,
so we may think of the thing over a period as a sum
of the temporally small parts which are its successive
momentary states. Combining these conceptions, we
see the thing as extended in time and in space alike.
(1950b, p. 210)
Indeed, Heraclitus himself did not mean his law to apply
exclusively to rivers. Πάντα ῥεῖ—everything flows. So it is
understandable that Quine’s response is meant to apply to
everything. Everything is like a river, every thing is a pro-
cess. Nor is Quine the only philosopher to have put forward
a conception of this sort. The idea that ordinary physical
objects are four-dimensional entities composed of spatiotem-
poral parts has a distinguished pedigree in contemporary
metaphysics, finding its roots in the works of Broad (1923),
Russell (1927), Carnap (1928), and especially Whitehead
(1929) and continuing to our days through the writings of
such authors as Goodman (1951), Smart (1955), Noonan
(1976), Lewis (1986), Heller (1990), and many others (up to
Ted Sider’s extensive defense in his book Four-dimension-
alism, 2001). But this is not the place to assess the general
tenability of this conception. Here I am only interested in
cities. And the suggestion I want to make is that cities, if
anything, are indeed like Quine’s river. They are not endur-
ing objects; they are processes. They extend in time just as
they extend in space. And we can walk twice through the
same city just as we can step twice into the same river: by
walking through different spatiotemporal parts of a single,
spatiotemporally extended whole.
Note how this view is closely related to the Port Royal
conception. To go back to our example, the Rome of bricks
and the Rome of marble are indeed distinct. They are distinct
(numerically) because they differ (qualitatively), and Leib-
niz’s law applies. However, their being distinct doesn’t nec-
essarily mean that they are distinct cities, two cities that we
tend to unite under the “confused idea” of ‘Rome’. Rather,
on the four-dimensional picture the Rome of bricks and the
Rome of marble are distinct city-parts, two spatiotemporal
parts of the one city that goes by that name, ‘Rome’. Ditto
for today’s capital of Italy, which happens to be a much later,
larger part. And ditto for countless other parts in between.
On the four-dimensional conception, ‘Rome’ is not a fic-
tional name that we keep using because we can’t afford a
different name for every different “state”, each of which is
strictly speaking a different city; ‘Rome’ is the proper name
of the one and only city to which each state belongs, the
spatiotemporally extended city that consists of those dif-
ferent states. So there is, in a way, a one–one correspond-
ence between the many successive cities of the Port Royal
conception and the many successive city-parts of the four-
dimensional conception. But while the former are unified
merely by an act of the intellect, the latter are unified by the
part-whole relation. While the Port Royal conception can
only speak of Rome as a frail ens successivum, each element
of which is in some sense a counterpart of its predecessor,
on the four-dimensional picture Rome is a solid ens exten-
sum, a genuine whole consisting of successive parts. And
walking though one part and then again through another part
is, literally, walking through the same whole, the same city.
I realize that the notion of a four-dimensional ens exten-
sum may strike some as even more implausible and fictitious
than the notion it is meant to replace—almost science-fic-
tional. I said that a growing number of distinguished phi-
losophers have taken it seriously, before and after Quine; but
of course there are also philosophers who have found that
notion “ontologically extravagant” (Lowe 1989, p. 134) and
“radically at odds with common sense” (Paul 2002, p. 587),
if not a sign of “crazy metaphysics” (Thomson 1983, p. 213)
or sheer “metaphysical quagmire” (Hacker 1982, p. 4). On
the other hand, no one would say the notion is intrinsically
extravagant and counterintuitive, let alone crazy, as if we
could not conceive of four-dimensional entities tout court.
Processes—as Quine himself reminded us—are perfectly
familiar entities of this sort, entities that extend in time just
as they extend in space and, therefore, are never wholly pre-
sent. I am listening to a piano concert. The concert is not
13
406
something that I can grasp in its entirety. It is an unfolding
event. At each instant, a different part of the concert materi-
alizes, so to speak. The concert as a whole is the sum across
time of these distinct temporal parts. It is a four-dimensional
entity. And what goes for the concert goes for every process,
indeed every event that is not instantaneous. A lecture, a
theater play, a party, a promenade, a football game, a war,
a tornado, a life. Each of our lives unfolds over time, liter-
ally, and we have a clear understanding of what that means.
There is nothing extravagant or radically counterintuitive
about that.
Well then, the suggestion is that cities are entities of this
very same sort. Quine didn’t say that a river is like a process;
he said the river is a process. Similarly, the suggestion is not
that cities are process-like objects; it is that cities are pro-
cesses, strictly and literally. And once you start thinking of
cities as processes, it’s clear that the problem of change dis-
solves. Just as we can say that a concert changes from being
quiet to being loud insofar as its earlier parts are quiet and
its later parts are loud, so Augustus could say that his city
changed from being made of bricks to being made of marble
insofar as its earlier parts were made of bricks whereas its
later parts were made of marble. Indeed, once we think of
cities as processes, change through time is no more mysteri-
ous than change across space. Just as, strolling around Rome,
we can say that the city changes from being empty to being
crowded insofar as it has a spatial part (there) that is empty
and another spatial part (here) that is crowded, so Suetonius
could say that Rome changed from being unworthy of her
position as capital to being worthy and strong insofar as the
city had a temporal part (in 27 BCE) that was unworthy and
a later temporal part (in 14 CE) that was worthy and strong.
No problems with Leibniz’s law. No mystery of survival.
No need for magic ontic glue. When it comes to processes,
change is nothing more nor less than variety. To change is
nothing more nor less than to possess different parts—quali-
tatively and numerically different parts.
6 City Lights
With all this, the suggestion is certainly incomplete. It does
provide an answer to our main question, what is a city?
And the answer does not amount to a metaphor of sorts;
it is a substantive, metaphysically informative answer.
Nonetheless, it’s obvious that it all depends on the under-
lying notion of a process, and I have said very little about
that. What is a process, exactly? How exactly do processes
unfold over time? Which processes are real, as opposed to
fictional constructions generated by some “action of the
imagination”?
13
A. C. Varzi
Moreover, the thesis that cities are processes is only a
partial answer to our question. I said the answer should
deliver a proper semantics of city names; it should tell us
what it is that we are talking about when we use such names
as ‘Rome’, ‘Beijing’, ‘New York’, etc. Surely this is still
missing. In order to get a complete answer, we need clear
criteria for determining what exactly are the parts of a city.
For any city, we must be able to determine what are the
parts that make up the whole—the spatiotemporal parts that
constitute that city. This task can be truly challenging, as
often is the task of specifying the exact part-whole structure
of a process (and the relationship between its parts and its
participants). What are, exactly, the parts of a concert, of
a party, of a promenade? What are the parts that make up
Hurricane Katrina? What are the exact spatial and temporal
boundaries of the process that culminated with the storming
of the Bastille on July 14, 1789? Even our lives are hard to
pin down with mereological precision, beginning with the
difficulty of specifying exactly when they start and when
they end. The controversies on abortion and euthanasia are
but one important sign of this problem. However, precisely
for these reasons, questions concerning the spatiotempo-
ral extent of a city instantiate a more general question that
arises with regard to processes generally, so the answers will
depend on the particular process metaphysics that we adopt.
Indeed, we already have this problem with a city’s spa-
tial parts. Even if we just focus on space and ignore the
diachronic dimension altogether, determining exactly what
counts as part of Rome at a given time—what counts as part
of any city at a time—is no easy business (Epting 2016).
How far does a city extend? Surely there are official (admin-
istrative) borders. But are those borders enough to nail down
a city’s extension and identity? In the past, the perimeter
of a city had genuine dioristic power. Rome itself, as Ovid
tells us, was brought into being when Romulus’s plough
“marked out its boundary” in the ground (2000, p. 108).
The sulcus primigenius, the pomœrium, and eventually the
walls have for a long time served to define a city’s profile
(sometimes with remarkable geometry: think of the beauti-
ful star-shaped Palmanova, or the circular magnificence of
eighth-century Baghdad). Today, however, cities spread out
further and farther, fading indistinguishably into suburbs,
exurbs, mallburbs, McBurbs, rururbs, etc. Their official spa-
tial boundaries have no identifying force. In fact, today we
are more inclined to identify a city by its vertical boundary,
its “skyline”. And yet, even that boundary is utterly elusive.
For there is no skyline. A skyline is like the horizon: you can
only see it from a distance.
Be all that as it may, I am going to leave such questions to
another occasion, as I am going to leave it open how one can
at this point begin to address the further issues I mentioned
What is a City? 407
at the beginning, starting with the distinction between the
physical or material aspects of a city and its sociological
aspects. These are issues that go far beyond the basic frame-
work I meant to suggest. I actually see it as a virtue of the
framework that it allows us to work out such further details
in different ways, depending on our overall philosophical
views. Here I just want to end on a simple, positive note.
I mentioned earlier that the idea according to which our
world is populated by four-dimensional entities has become
rather widespread among contemporary philosophers. Not
only processes and events, but even material objects are
often construed as composite entities consisting of spati-
otemporal parts. Objects like stones, tables, perhaps even
human beings are said to be four-dimensionally extended.
The reasons for holding such a view are many, including the
fact that the picture of the world that emerges from the sci-
ences, beginning with relativity theory, seems to be incom-
patible with the traditional conception of objects as three-
dimensional entities that are wholly present at each instant
at which they exist (Balashov 2010).
As I said, I do not intend to push that line here. All I am
saying is that cities are entities of this sort. They are unfold-
ing processes, like rivers, like concerts, like our very own
lives. Now, when it comes to tables and stones, it’s hard to
feel excited about them. Construed as processes, such things
are generally pretty boring, surely much more boring than a
concert or a person’s life, much duller than a game of foot-
ball or a theater play. Indeed, this is precisely how Nelson
Goodman drew the line between ordinary physical things—
construed four-dimensionally—and events: an event is an
“unstable thing”, a thing is a “monotonous event” (1951,
p. 286). Well, I think we can say cities aren’t “things” like
that. Cities may be crowded, noisy, and hectic, but they are
not monotonous. They can be chaotic, frustrating, annoy-
ing, inhospitable, stressful, challenging, frightening, violent,
daunting, inequitable, discriminatory, awfully hard to cope
with, but surely not boring. In fact, if you allow me the term,
for all these reasons cities are exciting. Or in Mumford’s
terms: they are dramatically exciting.
So, in the end, this is the obvious explanation of why we
feel so attracted to them, more and more attracted in spite
of our gradually becoming citizens of the world. It is not
the psychological solidity of our cities that attracts us. It is,
much more simply, their enthralling metaphysics.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of interest The author declares that he has no conflict of inter-
est.
Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies with human
participants or animals performed by the author.
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