Ideas are inseparable from the worlds they create. Though cities are seldom planned and executed from scratch like those that populate Calvino’s novel, the form of a city incubates and develops particular modes of social interaction, establishing a kind of harmony between inner and outer worlds. If we’re rational people, shouldn’t the layout of our cities encourage us to think rationally? But this austere levelheadedness is a bit cold, a bit boring, and that’s without even considering the more alarming possibilities of social control that something like Stalin’s architecture suggests.

A quite different example is New York City, a cluster of islands whose central philosophy could be as simple as trying to stuff as many people as possible into its small landmass. Famously labeled “the culture of congestion” by Rem Koolhaas, the city has a history that vacillates between a veneer of grid-inspired rationalism and the occasionally absurd inventions that undergird it.

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