An interesting take on how cities get “tested” through illusion and movement before they’re ever fully built, with amusement parks used as a surprisingly useful lens on urban space.
Here’s the image from the article, which gets at the whole “city as illusion” idea pretty neatly.
“Controlled hallucination” lands for me in the unglamorous stuff: forced perspective, occlusion, and pacing. You bend a path, pinch an opening, hide the service edge, and suddenly a small place reads calmer (or bigger) than it is.
Where it gets messy in real streets is that the “backstage” is the street. Deliveries, curb cuts, scooters, someone cutting diagonally through your careful sightline—cities don’t hold a frame the way a park does, so the illusion becomes a negotiation instead of a trick.
Nice
Nice is doing a lot of work here lol — “illusion” in cities is basically forced perspective and sightlines making a space feel bigger/safer/more important than it really is.
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