the city as a controlled hallucination The contemporary city does not begin with planning. It begins earlier, in spaces where experience is tested. Before infrastructure takes form, environments are staged, adjusted, and refined through controlled settings. Early amusement parks such as Coney Island operate as compact worlds where fantasy, technology, and mass culture converge into spatial experiments, early prototypes of urban life. They construct immersive environments where illusion is organized, movement is scripted, and experience is engineered. What appears as escape already functions as a model. The shift from world fairs to amusement parks marks a transition to continuous spatial systems. Nineteenth-century exhibitions assemble fragments of the world into controlled environments, collapsing geography into walkable sequences of images. These spaces reorganize reality into consumable narratives.…