it's New York

--You should pay more attention to the thought that the reason you liked Warsaw was that it reminded you of New York.

--It's true that the alternation of narrower residential streets with trees and broader commercial streets with traffic did remind me of midtown Manhattan. But so what?

--New York isn't a typical city; your taste is corrupted.

--Me and Rem Koolhaas? But someone who read the manuscript for the book version of this study said that it showed how I was anti-Manhattan. (All that stuff about suburbs, and Maine, I suppose, and my slighting remarks about Greenwich Village nostalgia.)

--But New York is one of the megacities -- you've read Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells -- one of the world control towers. Most of the cities you should be thinking about are not so eminent; their power and financial situation, their place character, if any, will be quite different. So what can you learn from Warsaw that will help us with other places?

--Complexity.

Index
Warsaw and Krakow