We are all familiar with the architect’s or planner’s desire to straighten, to align, to regulate, to control, to slice. Images above: a typical urban proposal: before intervention to the right and after intervention to the left. As an image from a god’s eye view, the straight slice prevents you from getting onto the streets. It circumvents further evocations. In the name of modernisation, motor vehicles are prodded to flow smoothly through a city. Or in the case of Haussman’s Paris, the army allowed to advance unimpeded to all parts of the city. Straight lines save time, get rid of complications; they simplify and abstract. At the scale of a city, they are drawn with simplistic imagination and monumental strength.

If Proust had his way, he would reverse the images above. Before to the left and after to the right. As a master of the digression, he would renovate the broad avenue into little episodes of distraction. He would stop people from getting to places too fast. He would let people savour the incidental and the tangential.