We can ask how we might live within them, how they will age and wear down or be renewed. We can speculate on alternatives with the sense that these alternatives are real enough. But my point here is that our speculative imagination allows for the Repetition and the Narrative. To wonder what a character might do, or how we might act, in a play's situation or a design is part of our understanding of that design. Although there is Closure, there is as well our capacity to transcend that boundary to see more clearly the consequences and meaning of the design.
City planning is surely programmatic and policy-oriented and . . .
It is as well design, with a story, with paths of development, with programs for the education of residents. City plans are design writ large, but how to understand that writing is a matter for historical and particular context and facts, not usually reliably shown by the forms one can see. Narrative, Repetition, Homology are all important. Traditionally, cities are the places of justice and order in the world. Augustine refers to the cities of God and of man, Jerusalem and Babylon.