Race and city operate as myth and mirage intertwined.

Evidence

The simultaneously real and imaginary nature of the social life of cities demands that we think carefully about the manner in which the cultural traces of thinking about the cosmopolitan present owes much to techniques of governing, mapping, and categorizing populations that draw on ostensibly objective value-loaded lexicons of race and urbanism. … For an understanding of the interplay between race thinking and contemporary urbanism cannot escape the seemingly contradictory observation that the abstract basis of both of these sociologically powerful terms is tendentious at best; race a perennially powerful mirage and the city a normative myth as much as an empirical locus of analysis. For these reasons an understanding of the interplay of race and the city is in part an articulation of the myth within the mirage. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2255

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines race as ‘a perennially powerful mirage’ and the city as ‘a normative myth,’ and names their interplay ‘an articulation of the myth within the mirage.’