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03 Sep A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City
Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis By DAVID BYRNE Originally published in the Wall Street Journal
New Orleans on a rainy day. National Geographic Stock
There's an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I'd take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney's with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it's not really possible to cherry pick like this-mainly because a city's qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place's cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.