Explaining the Concept of Urbanisation based on the Distinction between the City and the Urban

Globally, the urban condition has fundamentally changed, resulting in the emergence of new urban spaces influenced by new modes of urbanisation. Discussing urbanisation or cities, assumptions arise about the nature of cities and urbanisation. Most urbanisation discourse have been city-cantered, as they have understood the city as the driver and cause of urbanisation. Discussing the city without understanding the urban is often misleading, because there are both strong connections and distinctions between the two. Most of the time, the city and the urban are used as if they were one and the same concept, with no spatiotemporal differences. They are different because they correspond to different processes of transformation and space reproduction. The aim of the current study is to compare the two concepts of the city and the urban, based on the status of each in urbanisation. Accordingly, appropriate readings are proposed to provide an understanding of these two phenomena. Based on the intellectual principles of qualitative content analysis, this research explains the conceptual framework of the distinct components of the city and the urban. The results show that urbanisation has been explained in four conceptual levels: urbanisation centred on the growth of the city that the urban as its adjective, urbanisation based on the urban transformed into a noun, urbanisation centred on the urban and weakening the city, and the urban as utopia.