City Lights (a preface).

Cities are buildings, are voids determined by those buildings, are people you meet when walking around in those voids.

Buildings are boxes around you, but also boxes above you. Such boxes can make you feel surrounded by walls, but they can also be scattered, and even float above your head.

Cities can be old, can be new, or old and new interwoven. You can walk on ground level, but also on catwalks high above the buildings on the ground.

Walls can be smooth, but also decorated by reliefs. Reliefs can be made with rubbish, with used packaged worlds what you would normally throw away.

A city pretends to be, always, ordered, and it seems always in disorder. Order in a city is complicated, unformulated, irregular. A city creates its own order, or it is you who create it, following your own ideas.

Cities can be poetic. So are people you meet and the cityscape you look on. Each of us walk in our own imaginary city meting imaginary people.

This book tries to be a tourist guide to such imaginary cities.

10.11.04, Yona Friedman