IMAGINARY CITIES

PLAYLIST: "IMAGINARY WAYS” LINK

Text by Vincent Moustache with AI assistance for research, proofreading, and translation. Illustrations by Vincent Moustache.

Dear Croissant,

Cities are impossible; you can't live in them, and you can't live outside of them. Collective entities, a giant brain, with networks, neurons, connections, lungs. Cities. Reality dislikes reality: the subway is full of people while we are people, and our visits are full of tourists while we are tourists. Cities, we project them—underground, aerial—and discover that we can neither dig nor fly. Cities are impossible because our own lives are impossible; it's just that we see things better in the faces of others, and, after all, a city is a beehive of thousands and millions of faces.

10 BEST CROISSANTS IN PARIS 2025

Map and list of the top 10 butter croissants of 2025 in Greater Paris sponsored by Charentes-Poitou AOP butter. List and Map!!

INVISIBLE CITIES

Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities" (1972) is actually a conversation, much like this newsletter, between Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan—between Italo and us, the readers—where Marco, or Italo, explains to the emperor his travels and the cities he has seen. It is a beautiful book that changes the way we think about, live in, and imagine cities, masterfully teaching us that all cities are actually an idea and that, through imagination, we can visit them all without moving from where we are.

LEGENDARY CITIES

Did Atlantis exist? It is unknown, and we only know about it through Plato. It was said to be an advanced civilization with flying machines. The sea swallowed it up. Troy and Babylon did exist—we even have major archaeological discoveries from Babylon—but they are legendary, mythical cities. So much has been told about them and there is so little contemporary documentation that, despite being real, they cross over into the world of the imaginary. They were almost certainly never as magnificent as people have claimed after so many years. Well, maybe they were; we will never know, but we will always imagine it.

THE CITY IS A LIVING CHARACTER

Fiction needs cities for characters to inhabit, and these cities themselves are often silent characters—sometimes supporting, sometimes protagonists. Take Gotham City, for example. The city itself is as much a main character as Batman, who fights to bring justice to it; so much so that the city itself could be the true antagonist of the story.

ONE-DAY CITY

Is there anything more imaginary than a city that only exists one day a week? That is what happens in street markets: people gather, trade goods, share their lives, and leave, and that place ceases to exist until the following week. The photographer Claudio Vandi understood this and visited, week after week, year after year, the markets of Oaxaca, Mexico, to tell us a story as human as it is unreal and even a bit surreal

THE CITY AND FULFILLING A DREAM

The Emerald City represents a dream—that of the Wizard of Oz himself, who arrived in a magical world and decided to build a city where he could be a king (really a tyrant) and sell smoke and dreams. All roads—made of yellow brick—lead to the Emerald City, and the characters travel toward it to fulfill their dreams. Sound familiar?

THE DREAMLIKE CITY

Little Nemo ("Little Nemo in Slumberland," 1900), when he sleeps, dreams that he travels to the world of dreams where the king is his friend and invites him on adventures. In this Art Nouveau comic (one of my favorite books), we see a dreamlike, stretched, surreal New York.

FANTASTIC PARIS

In the second movie, "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" (2018), we visit the Paris that we would all like to visit in reality: the Paris of wizards. There are two cities: the real one—a postcard Paris of the 1920s—and the city of wizards, with its ministry and its secret streets hidden in plain sight, accessible only through spells. As if we were in Cortázar's "Hopscotch" (1963), there is a real map—I have it—from the movie, and as if we were in Italo's "Invisible Cities," we can visit them while imagining the magical places by remembering the film.