What is a city?

... at moments like this, the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form round you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed ... We mould [cities] in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our personal form on them....

The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

--From Soft City by Jonathan Raban