Some are lovable, like the Emerald City of Oz, where you can get cleaned up after a rough road trip:
Then there are the cities which are better off as dreams – because in real life they would be nightmares. In particular, I think of the garden cities of Le Corbusier:
And then those dreamt cities which, tragically, got built:
Brasilia, the dream of Oscar Niemeyer
Albany, New York, Nelson Rockefeller
The Bronx, Robert Moses
There are people who map imaginary cities such as these of Gramen, the capital of the equally imaginary Scania.
In the San Francisco Public Library’s online card catalogue, there are 17,455 listings that begin “City of…” including:
City of Vice, of Ice, of Rocks, of Dust, and Ash.
City of Dreams, of Dreadful Nights, of Dragons, of Angels, of Fallen Angels.
Of Scoundrels, Rogues and Schnorrers, of Bad Men, of Lost Girls, and Lost Souls.
Of Promise, of Secrets, of Whispers, of Wind, of Glass and a City of Fire.
There’s a City of God and one of the Dead. All the way to the Lost City of Z.
Better yet, the cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities from 1972 in which Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of his visits to these cities (among others):
| City | Notable for |
| Despina | Different cities if approached by land or sea |
| Phyllis | Only the part you see at any one time exists |
| Moriana | Behind what you see is “rusting sheetmetal, sackcloth, planks bristling with spikes…” |
| Octavia | Built on a net over a chasm like a spiderweb |
| Eusapia | The dead are placed in an identical city, beneath the living one |
And then with the mythical city of Zobeide, Calvino comes closest to home. “They tell this tale of its foundation; men of various nations had an identical dream… and they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. The city’s streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dream.
Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.”
David Prowler Blog 
Brigadoon… exists outside of normal time… perhaps a city now… er and Z (zed), turns out to exist, a city(s) of 10 million in the amazon… largest cities in the world at that time (conquistidors saw, but entire civilization disappeared shortly there after)… now reveled by deforestation of the amazon
This got me thinking about the kinds of cities I like – SF, Paris, Barcelona, Venice – whose layouts are so different from the pics here (which I like in an intellectual way). Little, meandering streets, cozy accidental spaces, easy to get lost.
David–it was so nice to run into you and chat. I am really enjoying your blog and your writing. I love Calvino’s book and read it like poetry. It reminds me of Southern Exposure’s project a few years ago where they commissioned an artist to make an “Emotion Map” of San Francisco. Did you ever see this? I still think about it all the time. People recorded their feelings in different parts of SF, as well as emotional memories and stories, etc. As a psychotherapist obsessed with cities it fills me with happiness to look at the map.