Cities are fascinating. Kathmandu has been a home and much more to me all these years, and all my life, I have been exploring its streets, trying to understand what exactly makes this space a city? Recently, I found myself asking the same question in a city half way around the world.

A city for me was always about a permanent space. A city has buildings and roads and cars and drainage. I always thought it was all about physical infrastructures. I also thought the goal of any geographical location determined by political boundaries is to be a city. A village wants to be a city. A town wants to be a city. A city wants to remain a city. And everybody wants to be in a city, no matter how much they claim to hate it. City, for people and spaces, is the final destination. Isn’t that the reason we live in a world that is increasingly more urban? Isn’t it why our neighbourhoods are forever extending outward as if its survival hinged on continual growth?

Last month, as I watched Melbourne from its iconic Ferris Wheel, the Melbourne Star, I noticed an large open space being dug up for a foundation—a high-rise would soon stand in the vacant lot, in a city that already has countless high-rises. True, Melbourne is pretty, it is clean, vibrant and alive, but it also seemed to me—an outsider—that it is forever growing. Sydney wasn’t much different either. There were wider roads being continually built that linked suburbs and neighboring towns to the core districts; taller buildings competing with one another to touch the sky. Nearly 200 years after these cities were founded, it felt like they were still ‘becoming’; like they hadn’t found their true selves yet. As though they were constantly aching to be something else. And that is perhaps what cities are. 

A city is always under construction.

Whether built in an open space or replacing an older settlement, you will always find a new building that is taller than the last—a sparkling behemoth constructed from the latest technology. There are always roads to be made wider. New roads to be added. New transportation systems to be installed. New technologies to be incorporated. In the parks. Along the roads. In the buildings. Everywhere. To be a city, it seems it always has stay under construction. Just like our dreams. Just like our life. It needs to grow and outgrow itself.

A city is always full of movement.

Like a heavy monsoon downpour, you will always find people pouring into the city. Even if they complain about it all the while. Cities, they say, have more opportunities and facilities. People travel all the way to the city to earn, to network, to learn and to ‘become’ themselves. At the same time, there will also always be people who keep flowing out. Those that are old and find the once-vibrant city too noisy, polluted and crowded for their tastes. Those who grew up in cities want to move to the outskirts where they can find some peace and perhaps more affordable schools and housings. In that way, the outskirts too grow into a city, if not in a few years then in a few decades. There, in the end, is no escaping from the city.

And a city always has a soul.

Cities have people moving in an out. And with people come art, culture and perspectives. These fuse to create the soul of a city. This is what makes one city different from another, even when both the spaces might look and feel the same. Although Melbourne and Sydney were developed around the same time, with similar architectural influences, the souls of these two cities are very different. The same way as Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur are so alike, yet so unique onto themselves.

A city then, I have come to realise, is much more than just a space or physical infrastructure. Although legally a city is defined by its population, infrastructure and facilities, with so many stories and memories, it remains undefined as an idea. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a fascinating exchange between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, who is describing to the old emperor the 55 cities he has visited in the empire, when he is really just talking about his own hometown of Venice. A city might be growing and it might be alive, but in the end it is also what we ourselves bring to it.