If you ask a regular person to draw a city, not based on an existing city, but rather the concept of “city,” they might start by drawing the borders. To draw those borders, they might begin by doing something that almost no actual cities have done—make it some kind of simple shape. A square, or a circle, or a rectangle, something like that. Then they’d fill in the city stuff—streets and buildings and parks—within that shape. This isn’t the way cities really look, of course. The borders of many cities…
