A comment on Scott and Storper’s "The nature of cities: The scope and limits of urban theory"

Facing the main historical realizations of the city and the main theorizations about it, Scott and Storper look for identifying its invariant character. By distinguish between issues that, while occurring in the city, originate elsewhere in the social realm and issues that are intrinsic to it, they point to the ‘urban land nexus’ as the city unifying explicative principle, which stems from the trade-off between agglomeration economies and land shortage. I argue that this outcome lies on the confusion between the city and urban agglomeration at large and, ultimately, on the unresolved quarrel between structuralism and empiricism.