The city persists as an organizing concept more than a theorizable object

Evidence

It has been argued elsewhere that it is consequently more productive to think about the manner in which the city comes to serve as an organizing concept in writing and thinking about social and economic life than it is to attempt to “theorize” the urban (Keith, 2000). A focus on the relationship between observation of the city and the cities that are being observed problematizes both subject and object, disrupts any simplistic invocations of theorizing the city, and concentrates on the manner in which an urban sensibility structures our narratives of the real. In this sense, the city has stubbornly refused to disappear as a category of social analysis. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2261