ABSTRACT
It is easy to ask the question ‘what is a city?’, but-as you might have already anticipated-less easy to answer it. Let us think about images of the city to see why this might be so. Tour operators regularly advertise holidays to cities, where you can revel in the entertainments and sights that they have to offer. Meanwhile, other holiday advertisements proclaim the benefits of leaving the city and getting away from it all. It is not just holidaymakers and the tourist industry that have some sense of what cities are like. Commonly, people will talk of going to the city to get this or that; or they will say that they come from the city, whether because it was their birthplace or where they live. Airlines seek to move high-flying executives between cities: to make contacts, to build up business. Others, meanwhile, are down and out in the city. Moreover, governments tend to locate the major institutions of state in capital cities-some countries even build new cities for the purpose.
