Representing the city: from philosophy to urban theory

Abstract

There is a physical city and a city socially represented, named and individually collectively imagined. In the passage from one to another, there is a distortion since in any representation we found inevitably a certain amount of interpretation. In this paper I want to address the social representation of city through a critical study of the literature produced on this issue by comparing the visions of authors from different disciplines and confronting concepts as ideology or imaginary that deal with social representation from different perspectives. I will discuss the need of a critique applied to the city’s representation, a critic that does not exclude the acceptance of the fact of urban representation as a necessary one.