Urban centers of today’s world are ceaselessly transformed through the insertion

and erasure of buildings and landscapes. Obviously buildings and places don’t

physically move, at least very seldom, but ideas about buildings are transported

through the movement of people, ideas, imaginations and images. This circula-

tion is dependent on the intellectual structure of type, and it is in this form of

knowledge that buildings and urban structures move around the world where

they are replicated and molded into new contexts, transform social practices and

change local fabrics. Types and typologies are a way of organizing knowledge

into categories of kinds of things: urban is a type recognized by human density;

city is a part of a typology of settlement that includes agriculture, wilderness, and

so on.1 Although there are many forces that make cities, it is the conceptual

framework of types that enables this feat of movement.