1. Zobeide, Cities & Desires 5 p45-46
Zobeide is a city of dreams, desires, and pursuits. It originated from a sharing, identical dream of men from different countries. In their dream, people are in a beautiful city, the White City. In my imagination, maybe it is not white in the architectural sense, but the bright but soft moonlight brings beauty to the dream city, a kind of artistic conception that can only exist in dreams. People met a woman in the city. She had long hair and was naked. People all fell in love with her and start pursuing her, but no one succeeded. After waking up, people tried to find the city, looking for the woman, but still no success. So the people decided to bring the dream city into reality, and everyone arranged the streets along the path they were following and rearranged the streets where they had lost the girl so that they would not lose her again, but no one ever saw the girl again.
I think Zobeide is synonymous with all the stories that are driven by dreams and desires to the big city. The woman in the dream is the desire of people’s hearts, but when the desire stays in the mind, it is unreachable, and that is why no one can pursue that woman in the dream. People begin to take practical actions to find, to choose the city where “the girl might exist”, a city where their dreams could be realized. Those places are often subjectively embellished because there may be “that girl”. The reality of these cities may not be so rosy. That’s why the first person who came to Zobeide couldn’t understand why so many people wanted to be there because he didn’t look at the city through a dream filter. New York City is the one that comes to my mind when I read this imaginative city.
This is the visual exploration of Zobeide:
Actually, I blend two images of NYC together, one is old and dirty, and the other is more prosperous:
Original images:
2. Anastasia, Cities & Desires 2, p12
It is a beautiful and rich city, rich in material life and exotic, open-minded, and hedonistic. Food and wine, exotic jewelry, and men and women splashing in the garden pond are all evidence of a materialistic society. But beneath this beautiful surface lies the truth of desire. People are slaves of desire and a part of desire itself. This is a powerful city that has everything that individuals can’t have, everything that people want to enjoy but don’t have. When your desire is aroused, the city will stand naked in front of you, you can not stop, can not refuse, you can only surrender to his evil and sinister. In this city, all your slaves seem to be tied to desire, and your job is to make a desire come to life at the conceptual level, but the work itself is definitely a desire because you want to pay for something. In my opinion, everything is desire itself, and people have been assimilated.
From my personal experience, Shanghai is definitely in this category. Every corner of Shanghai is filled with desire. Bourgeois cafes, late-night jazz bars, hard-partying nightclubs, high-end restaurants above the clouds, branded stores of all kinds as consumerism. In this materialistic city, people are exposed to desires all the time. Some people are completely enslaved by desires. The sober individuals are always fighting against different temptations, and do not know when his surrender will come. Every time an idea comes up, this city gives you an answer. This is the magic city, this is Shanghai.
3. Zora, Cities & Memories 4, p15-16
Zora is not the kind of city that makes its own profile out of the city as a whole. Instead, every detail of the city creates memories for you, so that its memory points are so unique compared to other cities that can be summed up in one word. As mentioned in the passage, though there is nothing particularly beautiful or rare about them, the streets, the houses on both sides of them, the windows and doors of the houses are left little by little in your memory. This is a city to savor, a city to remember. This explains why the most knowledgeable people can remember Zora. For ordinary people, Zora is difficult to remember. It is not as iconic as other cities. Its connotation is so profound that it may reject the public. But unfortunately, in order to be memorized easily, “the city was forgotten by the earth”. I read to the end of the article without fully understanding what had happened, perhaps the city had lost its essence.
I can’t think of a real city that perfectly fits this description, but I think this is also a city that has lost its connotation. The city for some reason has self-doubt, perhaps giving up its uniqueness, perhaps trying to get closer to other cities in order to be remembered. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I can’t give an answer.
4. Chloe, Trading Cities 2, p51-52
In the city of Chloe, people are always in a hurry and are far away from each other. When people meet on the street when their eyes cross, a million thoughts come into mind, and opinions about strangers are formed. But this kind of thinking doesn’t last, and people quickly jump to the next goal and repeat the thought process. It’s a cold society, but human contact still happens.
Such cities are very common in real life. What impresses me most is Tokyo. When I walk at the intersection outside Shibuya JR station, the busiest intersection in the world, the most heavily traveled road, everyone is making eye contact with everyone else. I bet everyone has opinions and thoughts about others in their mind. But they’ll always pass each other. What’s the connection
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