What, then, makes a city? In his study of New Haven, Connecticut, Douglas Rae approaches what he calls the "urbanist" city. "full of citizens who were committed to it—by choice, by chance of birth, by economic necessity, or by some combination of these   . . .  A fully grounded city citizen would work full time within her city, would live her nights and evenings there, would educate her children there, would routinely shop in stores there, would worship there if anywhere, would live in a social network pinned down on the city.  This is the city that Michael Johns refers to in Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s as exemplified in the 1950s, the city at its peak: "The 1950s were the last time the city dweller regularly visited downtown. Mayors would no longer refer to downtown as "the hub and nerve" of the metropolis. Never again would downtown embody the industrial age in a reassuring mass of brick and terra cotta, in detailed cornices and cast-iron lamps, in trains and trolleys, and, as a final touch, in the steely arrogance of the new cars and skyscrapers."

      In his The City in History Mumford is more abstract: "The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity." In Cities, journalist John Reader comments that "the integral role of the city in human affairs runs deep—well beyond the streets and buildings and into the realms of conscious and sub-conscious awareness that makes us who we are."

      Approaching this another way, in his classic The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch provides an abstract definition: "[l]ike a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time." Lynch urges us to consider "the mental image of that city which is held by its citizens." His emphasis is on the physical form of the city, with "the physical environment as the independent variable," He develops this theme of "legibility" of a city "where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply and intensely to the senses."

      James Howard Kunstler in The City in Mind writes that "city-making is an art rather than a product of statistical analysis or social service casework. . . " Mumford notes that one of the themes in defining a city was developed by those who sought to argue the ideal city as a work of art: "[i]n part this effort marks a confidence that the processes of reason could impose measure and order on every human activity . . . Could not the city itself be treated as a work of art, subject to design and deliberate reconstruction?" And Witold Rybczynski in City Life writes simply that "cities are artifacts . . . they are man-made things." Joseph Rykwert in The Seduction of Place approaches this from the other side of the river, so to speak. He defends the city as "a precious, essential and inalienable part of the human achievement," to which some have held up "a distorting mirror."

      As the fictionalized Marco Polo observed in Italo Calvino’s speculative Invisible Cities: "Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents." In his introduction to his great poem Paterson, William Carlos Williams made a similar comment. He writes of the poem "that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody-if imaginatively conceived-any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions."

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