They know the net will last only so long. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. Save this picture! Illustration of Octavia, the spider-web city. With speculation and profit in mind, are we only going to see big and small boxes in the metaverse? The maps of these metaverse platforms are also shaped by desires. This allows for property to be easily parcelled and sold. They adopt a grid system with plots of land distributed on a horizontal plane. If we take a look at the layouts of some metaverse platforms, we can see the opposite pattern. In order to pursue the naked woman in their dreams, they turned the city into an ugly trap. Zobeide, a city with streets as puzzling as a maze, is shaped by men’s desires. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again. After the dream they set out in search of that city they never found it, but they found one another they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. Image Courtesy of Pooja Patelįrom there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. 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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