Model City
Excerpts from the forthcoming book "Model City".
"In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants
stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or
gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of
blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous
that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses
are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside,
camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at
the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city
of Ersilia still, and they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They
weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex
and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon
it and take themselves and their houses still farther away. Thus, when traveling
in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities,
without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which
the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.”
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
