This paper investigates how cities are described and understood in geography textbooks for Swedish upper secondary school, compared to how cities are described and understood within academic urban studies. Five different types of entry points to the study of cities within academia have been identified: morphologic, economic, social, cultural and environmental. Four textbooks have been compared with these understandings of the city and four of the entry points are represented in all the textbooks, while the cultural is only partly present in three of the books. The morphological and environmental ones are described more detailed, complex and with similarities to the academic understandings of the city. Within the economic and social entry point there are some confusion around central concepts such as global city/ world city and mega city, gentrification and slum. A second aim for this paper is to explore how teachers in the Swedish upper secondary school relate to the textbooks presented description, image and understanding of cities. Three teachers have been interviewed and all of them teach urban geography independently from the textbook used in their class: one of them focus on the sustainable city and use fieldwork, the second teacher do not have a separate assignment about cities but include it in different part of the geography course, and the third teacher include a section on cities within the demographic module. All the teacher agree that urban geography is an important part of geography, and all of them have felt the need to use other sources than the textbook to give an up-to-date description of the city, and to give local examples.