‘I’m a Jo’burger at heart,’ I remember my friend saying once. It struck me that, at the time of the conversation, he hadn’t lived in Johannesburg in years and was speaking, in fact, from some other city – I can’t remember which – where he was then living.
His words reminded me that a city – a geographic location typically navigated and experienced with our external senses – is also experienced and lived internally, regardless of your physical location. You could live in London but carry Dakar within. When I extrapolate this idea, it makes me think that a city, then, is not only defined by external urban geography but also by internal GPS co-ordinates – heart, gut, soul.
