citiatiolike

Citiatiolike is a neologism used in sociology and digital humanities to describe a mode of discourse in which knowledge claims are constructed as if they were citations drawn from a plurality of urban sources or city-centered authorities. The term highlights how urban narratives, branding, policy discourse, and public debate often invoke multiple cities or city exemplars to legitimize arguments.

Etymology and origins are informal, tracing to a blend of city, citation, and -like, with scholarly attention focusing on how cities function as institutional authorities in public discourse. The concept has been discussed in analyses of urban storytelling, policy messaging, and online information networks, where cities act as encyclopedic or rhetorical references.

In practice, citiatiolike appears when writers frame ideas by citing "global cities" or urban experiences as if they were standardized sources, rather than interpreting them as contextual, contested observations. This can manifest in urban policy reports, branding campaigns, journalism, and social media, where references to cities are deployed to confer legitimacy, urgency, or comparability.

Scholars use the concept to distinguish citiatiolike discourse from conventional citationality. While traditional citationality concerns the practice of citing sources, citiatiolike emphasizes the mediating role of urban space itself—cities become authorities, benchmarks, or exemplars in argumentation.

Limitations of the concept include its metaphorical nature and the risk of oversimplifying complex urban phenomena by treating cities as monolithic authorities. It is primarily a heuristic for analyzing discourse rather than a defined empirical category.

See also: citationality, urban studies, digital humanities, urban branding.