It has always been my dream to design a city. Mostly for entertainment. But also an an exercise, and possibly for real.

I was first inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. I was twelve, I think. Although the eponymous dungeons of D&D were fascinating, but somehow unsatisfactory. This is true about many “dungeon” environments for games (especially video games). They are all absurd follies. Who would build a vast maze of rooms and passageways and fill it with treasure, guarded by monsters? Only a game designer.

What interested me more were the villages, towns, and cities. These were where the heroes went between dungeon adventures. But they were also the key to making the imaginary world seem alive. Of course, physical geography was also important. Too be convincing, a world has to have diverse and varied lands. To seem Earth-like, it would have to have a hydrological cycle, with rivers and lakes and seas, and many different ecosystems and natural biomes. If it were not strictly natural—say, a place built by strange gods—it would still need some form of internal logic.

Likewise, the human—or demi-human—build places would also have to follow some internal logic. And nothing more so than the cities.

We all have a rough sense of the logic of cities. Even if we haven’t considered them in detail. Cities are gathering places. Trading places. Transportation and logistical hubs. Centres of industry and politics. Being full of people, they must provide for those peoples’ needs: food, fresh water, shelter, warmth, transportation, and commerce, but also health care, death care, and spiritual needs. Depending on the technological sophistication, the city might also rely on service animals, and need to meet their needs, too.

Cities must import vast quantities of raw materials and finished goods, to provide for the persons, their households, and their businesses and other organizations. Likewise, there must be facilities to dispose of their waste and refuse, lest it pile up in the streets and choke the city to death.

Modern cities add to this the need to distribute electricity, and other forms of energy. Though we would all do better if we got rid of the natural gas, coal, oil, gasoline, and the like.

Cities have been compared to super-organisms. Humans, buildings and other superstructure, infrastructure, animals, vehicles, roads, waterways, plumbing, sewers, power lines, trash receptacles, and more, are the various organs and tissues of the city. The city consumes energy and materials, and produces waste that must be eliminated. In truth, a city is somewhat like a plant, or perhaps something like an anemone: an animal that does not move, but situates itself within a flow or confluence of energy and matter. It extends its many tentacles out into the landscape, to capture nutrients from its surroundings.

Like an organism, a city is mostly self-organizing. Even as its inhabitants impose their will upon it, that will rarely extends far from their own bodies. Each space occupied by a person—or a family—is its own cell. When the people go to work or to school, they temporarily occupy and animate different cells, while their home cells slow down or go to sleep, to resume activity in the evening, before going to sleep again at night. The overall effect of all of these little cells doing their own work to survive, exchanging with one another, is what creates the city in totality. Sure, the individuals may collectively choose to elect politicians, or elevate one local company over others, such that those few have proportionately more influence over the entire city. But still, compared to the total, their contributions are still relatively small.

So how can one design a city? In fact, one can only design small parts of one. And only in a static way. An architect can design a building. An urban planner can design a neighbourhood: roads, plots of land for buildings, streets, plumbing, sewers, power lines. But once built, the inhabitants take over, and the neighbourhood begins its unpredictable life, according to its changing needs. A city is a collection of neighbourhoods and districts, which interact with one another, adapting as necessity dictates.

In our fantasies, however, the designer can do even more. They can design the people, as characters, who inhabit the city. They can imagine what these people want, and their schemes. They can imagine the different cultures and communities, the leaders, the heroes and villains. The city is brought to life, in the imagination, by stories about its inhabitants: the citizens.

The dream of designing a city is to make a vibrant place full of dynamic people. To imagine how one could be different, and hopefully better. Even if one cannot dictate it, without removing from the citizens that which animates them, which is their individual spirit. The city must grow and change and evolve in its own way. But we can imagine how to guide it, how to nurture it, how to feed and care for it, to ensure that it thrives.

For me, the fun is always in trying to imagine all the strange and wonderful departures from the plan, even while those same deviations from strict order frustrate and infuriate. It is the unexpected and surprising that makes the city come to life. Whereas if it were a strictly functional utopia, meeting every need, solving every problem, eliminating every inefficiency and all forms of waste, it would be nothing but a vast mechanism. But in every living thing there is also mechanism. The mechanical and the spontaneous must always interact, in order for life to happen.