Within the established language of description used by modern urbanists and sociologists, certain models of thinking about the city have formed - in other words, conceptualizations. Today, the concepts that form their foundation and the models of thinking themselves are experiencing a period of semantic “inflation” and are in dire need of serious reflection. This book is about such conceptualizations: about the history of their emergence and opposition, about the philosophical foundations and attempts to bring them to life. In his research, Victor Vakhshtein shows how the ideas of “local community”, “urban everyday life”, “territorial control”, “public space” and “social segregation” were consolidated in the language of sociologists, architects and planners, and how they were transformed from categories of knowledge into tools of management . Conceptualization theory reveals in the chaotic diversity of modern megacities traces of utopian cities created by the research imagination - from Bourdieupolis to Ciudad Delanda. Viktor Vakhshtain – Candidate of Sociological Sciences, MA in sociology at the University of Manchester, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninki), Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the RANEPA.