"The City" could be any big city the speaker considers important, though the uber-big city is definitely New York, or in times past, Paris. The problem is, that I live near L.A. and it's *not* a city, nor a "the city," despite being big and housing more people than most U.N. nations and The Industry (that one's definitely right) and a few other industries, since L.A. actually does surpass The Industry and does other things too, in a way that Las Vegas never gets to surpass the Strip. L.A. is a wide populated place with a lot of interesting characteristics, and it has a city center, and all its component cities have city centers, and it's not "a city" except in population terms. And neighboring towns have city-ish town centers, which are pretty much the same things. And none of it is city like New York or London or Paris are central cities of their respective nations. (This bugs me for definitional reasons, because denotations doesn't match connotation and I need to rewrite the dictionary, which in a real sense would be rewriting the social contract, and I'm not up to that.) Just, there's a difference, somehow.

But.

Nobody gets to say L.A. is not *as much of a city* as other contenders (including New York for many purposes), because that's a fight L.A. won about the time The Industry got big enough to rock the world economies, during the previous Big Depression, but it wasn't generally acknowledged and we got decades of sniggering about the "Big Orange" and we're still sore.