I’ve studied historiography, the study of how people have studied history throughout time. The reading from Theoretical Perspectives on the City interested me for this reason. I started viewing cities I know through their theories. San Francisco, as a commuter city with some very nice residential areas within the city limits, looks like the concentric circle and wedge models from urban ecology. New York City has elements of both the gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Within this complex of cold urbanism are nestled smaller, more personal communities where members are ethnically and religiously similar. And then LA just makes no sense, which makes it perfect for the postmodern paradigm. As I mapped cities through these paradigms, I recognised my – and these paradigms’ – biases. Urban ecologists and I like to see the order in structures. Marxists and others who view history as a struggle between parties would be drawn to political economy to explain city dynamics. And postmodernists view the world through a subjective and fractured lens; the chaos of an urban landscape is appealing. Their natures influence their interpretations. Though no one theory can fully explain it, through all three we can get a clearer picture on what makes a city.

Questions: How would you interpret cities you know and have visited? With which school of thought do you most identify? Why do you think that is?