Define City
City has been a term to denote a place with a great number of human settlement.
A closer term for city is Town.
Town also means a symbolic place with its meaning given by country authority with its given function to impose political, economic, functional, infrastructural and interpretative values.
In a human-existential sense, a city is a place with many people come together.
In the case of developing country like Malaysia, city does not have a high living population compared to the city outskirt, but the non-static, transient population - the traveler and working group.
In another word, you can say that the symbolical city is a city by day, NOT a city by night in human-existential sense.
This renders the city on a symbolic level would lose its value in human-existential level in the evening.
And where does the city goes? The city moves to the freeway.
In this case, the city is moving. It moves to the suburban.
In relative terms, population defines a city. In this case, suburban with high living population is a city.
In terms of the relative number of dwellings (apartment or housing units), we can almost call a 300 units apartment that can house a family of 5 as a city.
A 1000 units apartment is a big city.
So where are we getting into?
1. City benefits from its relatively big human population working collectively. This is also the quality of difference that it has that the other lesser densely populated area don't.
2. We do not realize that we are building more and more cities and they do not function as a city at many levels, cannot cope as a city at many levels.