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I have spent the majority of my life in New York City. I like New York a lot, but I somehow don't feel comfortable saying that it's where I "grew up". A big part of that feeling has to do with the fact that I don't feel grown, but it also is largely due to my sustained identification with the city. In class we've looked at bird's eye views of cities- we've seen the twelve spokes off the Arc du Triomphe, and that "large and accurate" rendering of London's streets. I can't see New York City like that just yet; there isn't enough distance, in either the spatial or temporal sense of the word. I don't really know what it has given me.

As Massey and Pile march us toward a working definition of 'the city', they speak of what the city doesn't have. Urban space lacks agricultural production. Urban space is built around and upon legacies of civilizations long, long gone. Mexico City's Templo Mayor, Rome's Colosseum- these urban icons point deftly backwards. They are only symbols of the current city because they are relics of a fallen one. Maybe I need to think about loss and deficit when I try to define "the city where I grew up". Maybe I grew up in Istanbul, when I crossed over the Bosporus for the last time and flew back to America, away from my beloved host family and that city's astounding blend of East and West, the cosmopolitan and the truly old. Perhaps Paris is the city in which I did my "growing up"; it was there, in a shared apartment in the 11th arrondissement, that I first navigated a foreign place without a guide, without a knowledge of the language, without a clue.