Often, and too often, I see a mathematical equation is exposed awkwardly and nakedly out of context, that is to say in the place of language.  Such equations, composed of annotated variables, or worse, word themselves, might appear amidst a discussion of important abstract concepts.  Take the following example which I recently saw: “Belonging + friendship + romantic attraction = Love”.  Nobody has trouble “reading” the intended meaning of the structured equation.  The concept, in this case “Love”, is a multifaceted concept composed of several necessary elements.  We understand the symbols of math and because we know their absolute nature we then extrapolate, forcedly and unexpected, the meanings of the factors, and we then take the outcome, or sum in this case to be necessarily true.  We read the equation like a sentence which is the critical error.  We unknowingly “concretize” the abstraction without the appropriately primed ability to do so and therefore we frame the thoughts and concepts imbedded in the abstractions in a prescriptive, simplified manner, as opposed to a descriptive, complex manner.  To appropriately concretize the concepts holistically in an equation as such would only be appropriate if the we assume that the reader has full knowledge and understanding of the entirety of the abstraction prior to encountering the equation,  and therefore the writing of said equation would be redundant and demeaning.  The use of language however allows for the subtle evocation of the nature of abstractions in a way which is descriptive not prescriptive like math.

Cities are often contrasted with other places of inhabitants by discussions of speed and rapidity.  People move quickly and talk fast.  Buildings go up and come down.  Neighborhoods flip residents.  Populations grow, disperse, and diminish in matters of years.  To Speak of change in the city is indeed a cliché. The city is a place of transience, of movement.  A plane passes, a train passes, a car passes, a stranger passes, whether or not on choose to stand still or not.  In many cities a river passes, and the city itself sits more like an eddy.  It is a point, for certain, a phenomenon, yet no matter how forceful or focused the motion, the eddy it is never as solid or as real as the land it flows over or the rocks that divide its waters downstream, such is the nature of the city. City dwellers might return to a more rural setting they once knew – perhaps in their childhood – and be taken back by the sameness of that place.  When returning to the city one is hard pressed to find the same sentiment for the city as whole. One may concede that a building or a person remains unchanged, yet the city could never. This nature which I find to be true in all the cities which I have known and known again begs the appropriateness of the term place in any discussion of the city a whole.  With the myth of place is crucial to define terms as well as scale, yet on those definitions of place which I will soon dedicated this investigation I find the city to be undeniably deficient.  By clarifying the definitions of such rhetorics, the ontological discourse of urban issues might be more appropriately addressed.