Cities, writes Storper (2013: 9), have a particular genius, which arises from their specific “behavioral context in which different elements of know-how come together … [creating] many overlapping worlds of face-to-face contact, [and] giving them a ‘buzz’ ”. As explained earlier, Storper's portrayal of cities as engines of economic growth and social advance is developmentalist, praising their efficiency while downplaying their role in uneven development as side effects of overall growth. The aim of this book is to challenge this one-sided enthusiasm for cities’ productivity and to re-establish a critical analysis of their role in capitalism.

Before that, however, we have to ask ourselves where cities’ extraordinariness comes from. If we do not assume that city dwellers are innately smarter and harder working by disposition than people in less populated areas, then what might the secret behind the economic power of cities be? Building on arguments from different currents in urban studies, cities’ exceptionality can be conceptualized through three characteristics, which, in this combination, are unique to cities and which can therefore rightly be described as being “intrinsically urban in character” (Scott & Storper 2015: 9), namely agglomeration economies, being a node in various inter-city networks, and a massive built environment. In this chapter I will assess these elements, in order to lay the urban-theoretical foundations of my argument. The first step, however, must be to address an even more fundamental question, namely: what is a city? Is there such a thing as the “nature” of cities, features that characterize cities across time and space? Are all cities equal?

WHAT IS A CITY?

Any discussion about what a city is needs to start with a clarification of what is meant by “space”, because cities are spatial things. Today, a relational interpretation of space dominates in the social sciences (and especially in the critical ones): space is no longer perceived in the Newtonian sense as an absolute a priori given substance, because such a view reduces space to a mere container of social processes, without any connection to them or meaning for them.