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.