A city is an identity in manifold presentations or profiles, some of which are reviewed here. Why and how do cities and planning allow for so many differing and apparently incompatible analogies (and theories)? To ask, What is really going on? is perhaps to miss that manifold. For cities allow for regionalized analogies, overlapping and incompatible, and many may be valid, at least regionally, at the same time. More generally, we describe thinking in analogy.
