Cities that haven't been built yet

My job is urban planning for the municipality of Amsterdam and the work involves taking existing city fabric and deciding what it should become over fifteen-year increments. It is a collaborative, contentious, compromise-heavy profession and I find it genuinely interesting and slightly exhausting in equal measure. The fiction I write is speculative, set in imagined cities that don't exist, and the act of inventing a city from scratch is extraordinary after a week of managing the constraints on a real one. I build the transit network first, then the residential patterns, then the commercial zones, and from those I build the characters, because how people move through a city tells you who they are. My current project is a set of linked short stories, each one set in the same fictional Dutch city in a different decade, showing how the social geography shifts. I live near the Vondelpark and I write on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. My partner is an architect and we have strong arguments about whether cities are primarily about function or primarily about meaning, and I believe these arguments are why the fiction exists. I am pro-meaning. He is cautiously pro-function. We are both wrong in interesting ways.