agglomerations and microcosms in the city

An otherwise unrelated photo. Electrical transmission lines and a utility pole in Philadelphia, 2010.

The view from the third floor had nothing unusual about it--no suspicious people lurking there or suspicious cars parked out front, just the usual drab expanse of this drab residential neighborhood. The misshapen trees lining the street wore a layer of gray dust. The pedestrian guardrail was full of dents. Rusty bicycles lay abandoned on the side of the road. A wall bore the police slogan "Driving Drunk: A One-Way Street to a Ruined Life." (Did the police have slogan-writing specialists in their ranks?) [...] Nasty looking wires stretched fron one ugly utility pole to another. The scene outside the window suggested that the world had settled in a place somewhere midway between "being miserable" and "lacking in joy," and consisted of an infinite agglomeration of variously shaped microcosms.

-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 p. 454

The world--and, consequently, cities--consisting of "an infinite agglomeration of variously shaped microcosms" is a description of much of urban studies today. See for instance, Urban Constellations or The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles.