but an ‘urban center’ in the USA is a cutout - like a toy train city-themed playset, draped around the truth. Even most of the “nice” buildings - butted up against the interstates, surrounding the three mansion-neighborhoods like an armored wall, separating the commercial districts into navigable arteries - are just facades.
Curtains of reflective plastic draped over cheap piping. Brick apartment buildings with no real bricks, just hastily glued & nailed on sections of textured cement, styled to blend in with nearby older buildings - stately former ‘middle class’ homes now all remodeled into boutiques. Further out, as money glitz starts to decrease, it’s not wood, but vinyl sheeting pressed into the mimicry of painted boards, a monoculture of grass pretending to be ‘nature’,
but those are expensive areas. Reality isn’t allowed in there. There will be some long stretches of ‘park’ - more ‘nature’ - cut into shapes that prevent anyone that matters from seeing the truth. Bourgeoisie, their servants, and aspirants, all live inside big panels of toy city propped up so that they never have to look at the truth.
In some places it’s blatant - like the big beige and yellow walls that cut any view of Buckhead in Atlanta off, in or out. People that have served there know what I’m talking about. If you’re driving on 285, those oddly leveled walls that literally block your view of the ruling class’s special shops and residences. There’s some variant of those in every city I’ve been in.
The truth is familiar enough, outside the toy city, jammed up on it from all sides, like a frozen wave crashing on a levy, brown and grey, dirt and logos, shabby little houses and predatorily priced apartments, appliances that don’t work, landlords that are mighty on their little hills, broken streets, disease, tragedy, joy, desperation, criminal convictions that the Innocence Project will never overturn and older siblings that will never return,