The Urban Blueprint: Most people live inside cities. Very few of them actually use one.
I want to start with something I noticed a few years ago — something so obvious that I almost missed it entirely. Walk through Athens early on a weekday morning, before the heat arrives and before the noise does. The city is already fully there. The plateia with its four old men and their backgammon. The covered market no one under fifty seems to know about. The neoclassical building with the iron gate always slightly open, revealing a courtyard (avli) full of orange trees. All of it—just sitting there, assembled, waiting. And most of the people who live here walk right past it. Every single day. I don't say this, as a criticism. I do it too, more often than I'd like to admit. But it struck me, and it hasn't let go of me since: we choose cities for everything they offer, and then we use almost none of it. The city as infrastructure I've spent a long time in Athenian real estate — showing apartments, reading neighbourhoods, watching people make one of the biggest decisi...