The City as a Classroom

Passing by the Brooklyn Public Library's ornate and imposing doors, I was reminded of this bit from P.D. Smith's City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age:

"In the seventeenth century, the Atlantis legend was one of the inspirations for ideal cities, such as Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602). A free-thinking Dominican monk imprisoned and tortured for heresy by the Inquisition, Campanella's urban utopia is built on a hill with seven concentric walled circles, the middle ones rising up above the outer rings. The design was influenced by Pieter Bruegel the Elder's famous 1563 painting The Tower of Babel with its seven ascending concentric levels. Just as in Bruegel's painting and in the original ziggurats on which it was based, the City of the Sun has at its centre, on the summit of the hill, ‘a great temple of marvellous workmanship'. The temple is round and its dome is decorated with sparkling star maps, as well as astrological verses. Indeed, the city functions as an encyclopaedia of natural and esoteric knowledge, each circle being decorated with illustrations from the sciences - trees, herbs, metals, as well as real and fantastic animals. This is the city as classroom, where the inhabitants absorb enlightenment by osmosis, as they go about their daily lives." (Smith, P.D., 2012, City: A guidebook for the urban age, Chapter 2, emphasis mine)