Justifying the physical arrangement of the city by means of human analogy has been done by philosophers, architects and urbanists, since the ancient Greeks. Through the development of science, especially the life sciences, this analogy has been broadened and the city has been metaphorically considered as a living and growing organism. In this context, the metaphor has played a fundamental role as a cognitive device for transferring the human concepts to urban theories or vice versa. The present study aims to understand why cities have been compared metaphorically to the human and how it has been beneficial to theorists, architects and urbanists. It is believed that the application of the human analogy in urbanism is helpful as a method of comparison for arguing urban theories and projects, and describing complex urban discourse. A chronological study shows a parallel between the knowledge of the human and the development of anthropological urban theories. Although the reflection of these two fields has been addressed by many writers, there is no comprehensive reference that comprises the prominent related theories and practices. Four issues prompted this study: The complexity of urban discourses and the lack of a universal theory of urbanism. These two - as the main promoters - motivated the author to study the anthropologic urban theories. From the very beginning, two problems arose and became the primary concern of this research: The absence of a comprehensive study on anthropologic urban theories and practices; insufficient study on the science of metaphor in the literature of architecture and urbanism. In order to find answers, the questions of this research were divided into three main elements: the first two being the city and the human. However, what may not be apparent as the third element is the term metaphor, which incorporates the other two. Providing an answer demands putting these elements in a meaningful order and establishing a relationship between them. In this research, the discussion of metaphor is considered as the starting point and a platform on which the other elements can be resolved. Since the discussion of anthropologic urban theories and practices is fundamentally based on metaphorical expressions, it seems necessary to address the knowledge of metaphor as a fundamental matter of this dissertation. To that purpose, theories of metaphor, the application of metaphor in architectural and urban contexts, and the features that make their use inevitable will be discussed. As case studies, the authors of the most notable anthropologic urban theories and practices, from Ancient Greece up to 1960s, have been studied and included in this dissertation. Plato, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Patrick Geddes, Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, Kenzo Tange, Team 10 and the Metabolists were selected because they provided unique, comprehensive, methodical and inferable theories or projects justified by scientific metaphors. In conclusion, the main studies of this research – metaphor and anthropologic urban theories and practices – are unified. It will demonstrate that the science of metaphor plays an important role in understanding and explaining urban issues. In this context, human analogy as a metaphorical approach towards urbanism helps us deal with the concept of the city in terms of design, planning and complex urban discourse.