What makes Varzi’s essay distinctly significant for this special issue is in how he takes up as his case study Mumford’s work on the city as “inspiring” the entire domain such that “...Mumford’s essay is rightly regarded as a benchmark of modern urban studies.” However, his critique is quick to follow as he questions the unexamined presuppositions of Mumford’s approach: Nonetheless it betrays exactly the sort of dualism between the physical and the social that I want to resist.
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