What is a city? (Text & Drawing)

What is a city?

Musing on the creation and evolution of cities 

What do we traditionally understand as a city? It is often defined as a human settlement found inside administrative boundaries, that has undergone a process known as urbanisation, leading to the development of a primitive urban tissue that frequently includes a comprehensive transport system linking different districts, which vary in use and range from housing to non-residential oriented activities, purely recreational spaces, as well as workplaces. 

This does certainly sound like a recipe for a common underlying theme that represents all cities, and it would indeed boil down to this if it wasn’t for the most significant ingredient of them all: a city’s identity. A series of distinctive traits define a city’s identity and set it apart from all the rest, be it its cultural heritage, historically important landmarks or the people that forged said site in the first place.

In my interpretation of a city, I do follow a more conventional approach to it and associate it with an urbanised area of considerable dimensions, commonly divided in smaller sectors connected by an infrastructure. But to me, the true spirit of a city resides in the philosophy complied with when first designing it, that eventually leads to a never-ending exercise that continuously develops and strives to improve urban metabolism, morphology, efficiency and cohesion. 

A fully functional, well planned and methodical city is the purpose of competent urban planning, and the backbone of such city is compactness, complexity and cohesion, where accessibility and short distances bring us all together.