To unravel the lived, affective, and affiliative properties of the city, this essay deploys the term "hometown" to distinguish it from the usual sense of it being just an urban landscape or geographical site. There is a mutuality of self and space that is not fully engaged in political or sociological interpretations of the city. While humans live in cities, cities live in them as well. Hometown represents a charged relation to a particular place, which is shaped by human emplacement, affiliation and imagination. Any place may become a hometown or there may be a multiplicity of them. What is examined here is how the fundamental human condition of belonging relates to the city, more so than the national state.
