connections.

Here is the sort of thing that happens if you learn stuff for fun:

I finally started in on Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London excellent series of paranormal/urban fantasy police procedural novels. The protagonist is an African-British police constable, who among other things was training to be an architect, dropping out when he discovered he couldn't draw, but with a practiced eye, he guides the reader through the centuries of British buildings. The fourth book, Broken Homes, focuses on a failed modernist high-rise building built when architects thought they could build a better society by separating living space from retail or work space, raising people up, literally, by building upward.

(The astute reader will notice this is the exact opposite of the "mixed-use" standard we're currently working with, where homes and shops and businesses are all together; this is not an accident, as all of these projects failed in pretty much the same ways. Nobody bought into these ideas when they were introduced in the 1920s and 1930s; it was only World War II's destruction of Europe's housing that provided an opening.)

At the same time, I was reading J. G. Ballard's novel High-Rise, which takes place in a modernist skyscraper, and whose first paragraph hints at a dystopian narrative:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension.

While that was all fresh in my mind, I suddenly had a yen to listen indiscriminately to episodes of the fabulous 99% Invisible podcast, which I'd previously dropped because a lack of commute also means a lack of podcast-listening time. And I just happened to hit a two-part episode about--wait for it--an enormous modernist tower project in the Netherlands, called the Bijlmermeer. You can guess what happened to it, although it has its own Dutch spin on things, like the role of Suriname, the project's pragmatic and seemingly effective redevelopment, and then there's the thing where a 747 crashed into it.

I actually found a podcast devoted to hunting down this kind of inter-relatedness, though mostly from the Renaissance and earlier: The Endless Knot, brought to us by a pair of delightfully nerdy history/language professors.