Save this picture! Illustration of Zobeide. The Appearance of a City is Shaped by Our Desires Let’s travel through Calvino’s cities to discover the meanings of cities, and get inspired while building the metaverse. By rearranging the elements, like combinations and permutations, you can construct dozens of cities with different characteristics. With poetic imagery and geometric rigor, Calvino intertwines various elements in the catalog, “Cities and Memory”, “Cities and Desire”, “Cities and Sign”, “Thin Cities”, and “Trading Cities”… Through this means, the city forms a huge intricate labyrinth, with countless alleys and intersections intertwined, and readers are caught in this vortex and cannot extricate themselves. Over eleven thematic groups, Marco describes a total of 55 fictitious cities, all women’s names, to give rise to a reflection which holds good for all cities in general. It looks, indeed, as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life and Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know. What is the city today, for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live there. The book consists of brief prose poems, describing a series of verbal reports that the traveler Marco Polo makes to emperor Kublai Khan, telling fantastical stories about the cities that he’s visited. You can start reading it from any page, and each chapter is like a dream, short, bizarre, and traceless but with endless aftertaste. It is a short book, like a piece of jewelry made with fragments of dreamland. Invisible Cities is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino, published in 1972. Without the constraints in the physical world, how do we draft the urban blueprints in the metaverse? I believe metaverse planners can find inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which he revealed a poetic and mathematical approach to “urban planning” in the imaginary worlds. However, from a spatial design perspective, they have so far been lame and ordinary. The current “mainstream” Metaverse platforms serve as experimental containers to host the wildest dreams of virtual worlds where we are supposed to unleash the imagination. We are still at the dawn of the Metaverse, the next wave of the Internet.
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