A large urban centre, functioning as a central place, and providing specialized goods and services. There is no worldwide, or even European, agreement over limiting figures of population size or areal extent for a city. Indeed, A. Amin and N. Thrift (2002) note that ‘the traditional divide between the city and the countryside has been perforated’. Geographies of the city include: the politics of public space (D’Arcus (2004) Space & Polity 8, 3), and how the city is experienced by different urban dwellers: ‘urban space equals difference, not merely coexisting differences and different perspectives, but contesting differences and unequal power relations’ (Cupers (2005) Int. J. Urb. & Reg. Res. 29, 4). I. Sagan and M. Czepczyński, (2004) discuss the quality of urban life; T. Hall and M. Miles (2003) write on urban futures; see Jones and Evans (2006) Urb. Studs 43, 9 and Bell and Jayne (2003) Local Econ. 18, 2 on urban regeneration (Atkinson (2003) Urb. Studs 40 complains of the blandness of regenerated cities). Glaeser et al. (2001) J. Econ. Geog. 1, 1 argue that the critical urban amenities are: a rich variety of services and consumer goods; aesthetics and physical setting; weather; and ease of movement within the city. See Bell (2007) PHG 31, 1 on the hospitable city, and Hannigan (2007) Geog. Compass 1, 4 on casino cities, which ‘elevate consumption and spectatorship at the expense of economic and social equality’.

A city may drive capital accumulation (Martin and Ottaviano, CEPII W. Papers 1996–14); Glückler (2007) Reg. Studs 14, 1 sees cities as business development nodes. A city may be a creative field: R. Florida (2005) argues that urban fortunes increasingly turn on the capacity to ‘attract, retain and even pamper a mobile and finicky class of “creatives”’. A city may be a multilingual and multi-ethnic community expressed through its infrastructure, public spaces, and festivals; Podmore (2006) Soc. Cult. Geog. 7, 4 observes that gay men produce clearly visible territorial enclaves in inner-city areas. Jouve (2007) Env. & Plan. C 25, 3 perceives towns and cities as political spaces, ‘in which relations are redefined through a play of confrontation and between social groups’. Amin (2006) Urb. Studs 43, 5–6 sees cities as endless inhabited sprawls: ‘the contemporary city bears little resemblance to imaginings of the times when urbanism stood for citizenship, the ideal republic, good government, civic behaviour and the ideal public sphere.’

Painter (2005, ICRRDS Background Paper) sees access to public space as ‘fundamental to the right to the city’; the core elements of which are ‘the promotion of equal access to the potential benefits of the city for all urban dwellers, democratic participation of all inhabitants in decision-making processes and [the] realization of inhabitants’ fundamental rights and liberties’ (Colin (2005) UNESCO). See Reynolds (2004) Econ. Geo. 80, 4 on social justice and the right to the city, and Amin (2006) Urb. Studs 43, 5–6 on the ‘Good City’.