Fake Travelling and Fake Residing

If you live in a city like Shanghai or New York, my guess is, your mental map of the city is actually a copy of its metro system. This is a good example of how people build something for some purpose which turned into something else eventually, without us knowing it. We want metro system to make sure a large part of the city population can travel fast across the city, to make it more convenient, and to connect different parts of the city, bearing different functions (i.e. administration, entertainment, production, consumption), into an integrated whole. The goal is physical integration, but the result is rather mental disintegration.

This may seem a bit too off. Is having my mental map the same as the metro map really that bad a thing? If it helps me complete certain tasks of my daily life, why not? Do I really have to have a "real" or "authentic" mental map to live by?

It's just my gut feeling, but when I saw Saudi Arabia's futuristic project "The Line" (still on-going, concept as shown below), I felt amazed and horrified at the same time.

The plan is to build a 170km long, 200m wide, 500m tall linear city, with an underground train running at a speed over 500km/h ceaselessly through the "spine" of the city (making it car-less, street-less, ecofriendly), an entirely glass mirror exterior, and a promise of "all basic services within a five-minute walking distance". 

This is high-tech-low-life at its finest. What fascinates me is the idea of constructing a city, not based on any community or any group's need, nor for the purpose of some power exhibition (or maybe it is, it's technocracy), but simply based on the "innovative use" of new transportations. That is to say, we are not building tools for our own use, but we are twisting our lives just to accomodate the tool's use, to make the most of the tool itself. All the same when I was talking about "fake travelling". Take the mental map as metro map for instance. Do you ever think about going to some places, not because you really want to, but because it's convenient to go there, like it's quite close to the metro line you're at? I do, and I suddenly find it very stupid. Going to a restaurant simply because the transportation, the way of going there is easy, whereas those restaurant with inconvenient locations are out of concern in the first place. The transportation is replacing the taste as our first principle when choosing a restaurant.

Now, of course, whenever we choose, we consider a bunch of factors: accessibility, quality, cost, and so on. Ideally, we make decisions based on a comprehensive study on all the factors involved. But the problem is, our minds do not work that way. We tend to care more about the factors that are close to us. (In cognitive psychology this is called the availability bias or the proximity effect.) And since living in a city with an advanced metro system (alongside a crappy road system often times) will eventually shape your mental map to the extent that whenever you go out, the first thing you consider is always traffic. I myself have more than once cancelled my planned outing, simply because the location is too inconvenient, metro-wise. Sometimes the location is not even far away, it's just somehow hard to get there within the current metro system, like, I have to switch twice and then walk a further 2km to get there.

Although the Saudi "Line" project is probably a failure in the end (thankfully), as reported by Financial Times Dec 2025, it is still a good thought experiment to imagine living in a linear city as such. You may start to lose the sense of neighborhood, block or community and may even start to think one-dimensionally, as a point on the "line" and nothing else. For those of you who have not the importance of flying around the world, you become more functionalized, more inserted to the city. You become like a mechanical part of the city. Actually, the functionalization of everything works so well that all your needs can be met without you making further connections to the other parts of the city. It's like living in a village, only everyone around you are strangers, with nothing else but the functions in common, and have all your lives under a totalitarianistic control. The order that the line is requires everyone to not do anything out of line (no punchline intended really), such as driving a car (there's no road in the city), running through a tunnel or delivering a speech in a plaza (no such thing). Activities should go with the facilities, and therefore restricted in the first place, by the designers of the city, in the name of the "line".

The line is just a logical development of the network city we're living in. The results only vary in degree. I call it fake residing, if not fake living.