The city calculates nothing

I'm a structural engineer in São Paulo and I design buildings to withstand loads I can model, stresses I can calculate, conditions I can anticipate. São Paulo cannot be modelled. It calculates nothing and keeps growing regardless. The speculative fiction I write is about cities that have outgrown their infrastructure and the people who live in the resulting conditions as if they were normal, because they are. My protagonist in the current project is a water engineer in a fictional Brazilian megacity in 2045, navigating a water crisis that everyone saw coming and nobody politically managed to prevent. The engineering details are correct. The political details are not fiction. I live in Pinheiros and I write on weekend mornings. São Paulo is the thing that keeps appearing in everything I write, even when I try to set it somewhere else. The scale of it. The informal structures alongside the formal ones. The way entire neighbourhoods function outside any planning framework while other parts of the city are micromanaged. I've read everything Ursula Le Guin wrote about imaginary cities and I've read the Cidade de Deus urban sociology literature and I'm trying to write something that has both registers: the human scale and the systemic scale, and the people who live between them.