Recognizing the inexhaustible quality of the urban flow of goods, capital and people that inform metropolitan life and in order to approach a means of interpreting urban travel writing, it is helpful to engage with a number of influential theoretical approaches for understanding cities. This chapter explores theories of the city along two main axes: first, as a material condition of the planning perspective, which is to say an urban environment concerned with function and place-making; and, second, as a narrative space, a space of practice where meanings are performed by subjects in places across space and time. Both of these axes correspond with common modes of differentiating between ‘place’ and ‘space’ thus facilitating a position from which to understand the interaction between ideological processes at stake in the strategies of urban planning and the ‘tactics’ of representation (Certeau [1980] 1990, xviii) in the travel account.

Theoretically speaking, the functionalist perspective, or how to manage urban environments, was the key perspective identifying modern cities as special entities that required new social, infrastructural and architectural arrangements. The identification of ‘modernity’ with the emergence of the city preoccupies the work of influential twentieth- century urbanists such as Georg Simmel ([1903] 2006), Louis Wirth (1938) and Max Weber ([1922] 1958, repr. 1969). In this view, ‘what is distinctly modern in our civilization is best signalled by the growth of great cities’ (Wirth 1938, 1) and, further, the shift from a largely rural to a predominantly urban society was understood to be ‘accompanied by profound changes in virtually every phase of social life’ (Wirth 1938, 2). In these sociologists’ conception one of the central factors shaping these changes at a macrostructural level was the new economic relations of production. Cities were largely conceived from the point of view of their marked economic drive, as the ‘seat of the money economy’ (Simmel [1903] 2006, 12), the centre for financial, economic and capital accumulation, and thus as the driving force behind new distributions of labour, which had far-reaching effects on individuals and forms of social interaction.