ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the visual contours of Sydney, a global city on the West Pacific Rim, and draws a brief comparison between Australia's Emerald City' and a Chinese city with a similar commitment to pleasure, namely Chengdu. It emphasizes the city as a human construction, comprising urban features that could be metonymically understood in relation to the people who live there, and vice versa. Edward Tufte, a professor of statistics and graphic design, exhorts us to escape flatland', to get out of the two-dimensional information space and to find strategies for extending the dimensional and informational reach of display flatlands. The affective structure of the attention, oriented to the transference of human characteristics and types, which the city, any city, invokes, can be recognized in the repetition of landmark phrases which residents use to comment on everyday life, and to articulate recognizable pleasures and gripes.
