The 1942 film “Casablanca” is one of the most lauded movies in history—and for good reason. The tale of lost love, heroism and sacrifice is gripping from start to finish and features career-highlight performances from Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, “Casablanca” won three, including Best Picture and Best Director for Michael Curtiz. Its iconic lines—“Here’s looking at you, kid,” “Play it again, Sam” and “Round up the usual suspects”—are still so commonly used that it’s easy to forget where they came from.

But there’s another distinction for “Casablanca” that I would add: It’s the quintessential “city movie”—and by that I mean it exemplifies what’s most important about cities: people rather than buildings or boulevards.

Everybody Comes to Rick's

For anyone who knows anything about the movie, “Casablanca” may at first seem like an odd choice for an urban planner’s admiration. Unlike “Roman Holiday” or “Manhattan,” “Casablanca” is not a love letter to the city it’s named for. In fact, the movie was not filmed on location in Morocco but in Los Angeles, on a Warner Brothers sound stage. What’s more, throughout the movie you see remarkably little of the city of Casablanca, even a Hollywood-set version of Casablanca. That’s because the vast majority of the film takes place within the confines of one relatively small space, Rick’s Café, a “gin joint” owned and operated by Bogart’s character.

The film centers around the different people who have come to Casablanca, mostly from all over war-torn Europe and for very different reasons. Some are Nazis and some are resistance heroes. Some are bastards and some are noble and decent. Nearly all are flawed in one way or another, but some are redeemable. At Rick’s, all these different people meet and confront each other, and it’s from this very human contact that the stories of the film emerge, both large and small. That is also what a city is all about—stories happen because of contact, collaboration and even confrontation within a set area.