Cities are not only to be viewed as geographical locations, as architectonic set-ups or as social and political environments which reflect particular sets of historical circumstances, but also as composites of historically determined multisensory conditions weaved into all relations and into the emerging and/or emergent cultural meanings. Pursuing this view, the article discusses e number of theoretical concepts from the cognitive perspective: (1) *body states* (investigation is based on a cognitive re- questioning of the famous Peircean concept of *firstness*) ; (2) *extended cognition* (analyzing the role of the world in influencing body states and, subsequently, mind states) ; (3) *active externalism *and *interiorisation of meanings * (referring to processes which enable meanings to become part of body states). The theoretical apparatus and the proposed analogy between human and urban organisms is furthermore applied in a case study of the Croatian city of Rijeka, focusing on the role and on the relevance of the sensory stimuli in the historical, geopolitical, economic, ideological and cultural construction of urban identity, while pointing to the sensorial elements as crucial to the detection and to the interpretation of the contemporary (*lived*) states of urban organisms.