In recent years, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has forcefully argued that the city must remain affordable for those who live and work in it, rather than becoming a space organized primarily around wealth, real-estate speculation, and exclusion. His interventions highlight a fundamental question at the heart of urban life: who is the city for? Is the city a shared social and political space, or a commodity shaped by markets and inequality? These questions make the city a particularly revealing site for social-philosophical inquiry. The city is a social formation in which key features of modern social life become visible and contested. Urban spaces concentrate political, social, and economic conflicts, and have long been associated with density, diversity, and forms of collective life based on the coexistence of strangers. At the same time, the modern city has also been criticized as a site of anonymity, acceleration, de-individualization, and social indifference. The city thus occupies an ambivalent place in debates about modernity, democracy, and social life. From a social-philosophical perspective, the city offers a lens through which to examine the foundations of the public sphere and the material conditions of democratic life. Taking the idea of a “right to the city” seriously requires analyzing urban life not only as a cultural form or life-style choice but also as an economic and political structure. Cities are shaped by processes of inclusion and exclusion, integration and segregation, and contemporary phenomena such as gentrification make these dynamics especially visible. Historically and today, urban development has been closely tied to capitalist modernization and global social change. In this seminar, we will approach the city as a distinctive social form of life. We will begin with classic social-theoretical and social-philosophical accounts of urban life (including Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Louis Wirth, and Walter Benjamin), before turning to normative perspectives on the city, such as Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to the city” and discussions of the city as a normative ideal (Iris Marion Young, Richard Sennett, Jean-Paul Sartre). The second half of the course will focus on a set of key themes: the relationship between city and public sphere; gentrification and housing; inclusion and exclusion; social difference and alterity; inequality, conflict, and violence; and the material and spatial organization of urban life. Alongside philosophical and sociological texts, we will engage with contemporary urban studies (such as David Harvey), as well as films and literary works. The seminar will conclude with a public roundtable discussion on New York City, bringing together students and NYC-based speakers, activists, or organizers to discuss current urban conflicts and transformations, and to reflect collectively on how social-philosophical concepts can help make sense of the city we inhabit.