In new cities built from scratch, such as Las Vegas was, the language of the city’s ‘text’ is often an easy read. For a city dweller, there doesn’t seem to be much to it: one simply be- haves according to the rules imposed by the infrastructure. In that sense, no alternative use of the cityscape is promoted. If we step into the shoes of De Certeau’s voyeur, navigating the back streets of Las Vegas using Google Street View (Fig. 3), we find ourselves in extremely polished environments. Those who are supposedly navigating the area on foot or in an air-conditioned car are battling the Mojave Desert heat and so seem narrowly directed and controlled: a pedestrian crossing, road markers, stop signs, fences, and red-coloured curbstones prevent those who are ‘lost’ from getting tripped up. A heavily armoured car underscores the atmosphere of control and surveillance. The street plantings are subjected to this rationalized scheme; palm trees and small bushes are neatly aligned in an artificial arrangement that matches and decorates the concrete jungle. In traditional Zen gardens, gravel beds are meant to represent a flowing river or a serene pond. Here, the gravel functions as a stone blanket, an ob- struction that prevents the natural from overtaking the urban stage. Overall, the scene depicted resembles the aesthetics of a first-person shooter video game. In such games, personal preferences and choices are challenged or even prohibited through the imposed comforts of regulation.

I wondered: To what extent does the built environment allow for prioritizing the senses when it comes down to its design? In my work The Urban Crust Is Not Flaky (Fig. 7) I developed a machine-learning programme that operates like a slot machine. The programme randomly places parts from a model landscaping catalogue alongside verbs from the gastronomical guide The Pastry Chef’s Companion. These engineered conceptual collisions yield results such as ‘concrete floor topped with dredged lamppost and frost- ed bridge pillar’ or ‘candy-coated sidewalk tiles with bride and illumination’.

Three-dimensional iterations of these generated scenes were performed in an exhibition space, suggesting the end- less possibilities for reconfiguring public space through the increase of its sensorial perimeters. However, when it comes to the implementation of these scenes, do our urban land- scapes allow us to interfere with their rigid rules in all of their complexity?