The Great Khan owned an atlas in which he gathered the maps of all the cities: those whose walls rested on solid foundations, those which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, those that will exist one day and in whose place now only hares’ holes gape.
The atlas has some qualities: it reveals the form of cities that do not yet have a form or a name. The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last page of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end cities in the shape of Los Angeles, in the shape of Tokyo, without shape.
This city is an imaginary city that Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about in a fantasy encounter.
Bibliography; “ Invisible Cities” Italo Calvino A Harcourt, Inc. 1974
