ABSTRACT
In this passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, young Marco Polo tells an ageing Kublai Khan of his exchanges with inhabitants of the city of Penthesilea. For me the passage invokes two related issues germane to this book. The fi rst is that understanding education policy in the inner city is similar to the traveller’s conundrum in locating ‘the city’; that is, the diffi culty in identifying the boundaries between different types of politics and policies, the broad gestures of ambiguity arising when educational policy converges with other urban policies. The second issue pertains to providing substance to the category ‘city’, in order to think about the geographies of education policy.
