The city is, above all, a project. The construction of a neighborhood or a building is always the result of a form of utopia. This original act is embodied in Tang Yi-Choon’s photograph. The image evokes the genesis of all human settlements: choosing a piece of land and deciding to settle there. More than a promise, the sign appears as the banner of a conquest already announced. This appropriation begins first in planning, where land becomes a malleable space and humans become quantifiable data. Alban Lécuyer tells this process of measurement and forecasting through lines drawn on a map and silhouettes purchased from image banks. The city is initially a disembodied narrative, an abstraction that exists solely through the power of human desire. The city literally settles, in an indefinite manner, on portions of territory. Edith Roux’s Suspension symbolizes the passage to the urban act by giving it the appearance of a technophile deus ex machina. The advent of the urban fact, described here as a human passion, seems to fall like a plague, following the logic of a phantasmagoric universality.