Dalston, Still Alive: What Makes a City More Than Efficient?

A future city can protect us from the weather, count us, route us and still fail to leave room for a saxophone. Dalston matters because it keeps making room anyway. In the novel’s 2046 London, old brick is bridged rather than erased, balcony gardens grow above tide marks, civic systems issue instructions and the market continues to improvise. Efficiency can keep a city functioning. It cannot by itself explain why anybody would love living there. The article asks what survives when informal music, food, dissent and chosen community refuse to become mere inefficiencies.