Nice accessible article. I’ve always been fascinated about the perception of places – The idea of what Paris or Tokyo or Berlin is and how they can drive ideas of transformation (and often disregarding, for better or for worse, some of the problems that come with it).
On a related note I love how places are represented and used in movies and books; always wanted to design something where they’d shoot a luxury car commercial (an odd goal in life, but one on my list :))