Cyberpunk 2077 has a very interesting position, there's a lot of interesting architecture detail and layers in what little I've seen of Night City so far (we'll

Cyberpunk 2077 has a very interesting position, there's a lot of interesting architecture detail and layers in what little I've seen of Night City so far (we'll see when the game comes out), including some parts of the city that look usefully old. It just has its own layers of the fact that Night City is an American city, here being designed by mostly Polish artists giving it a strange (accidental?) European sensibility, combined with the idea that in the source fiction (the RPG), Night City was a planned city that didn't ever exist before (the future year) 1994 (Cyberpunk itself was written in the 80s). So there are at least 70-ish years of layers and tarnish to put on the thing, but the fact that it is entirely distinct from a real place was a fictional conceit from the 80s fiction it inherits. Which is to say, that I think Gibson is absolutely correct that most "future places" are and will always be built on the tops of the bones of the old places. No one is going to demolish all of San Francisco or DC's haunts and landmarks. But also that's not a criticism that I think directly applies to Cyberpunk 2077 as a specific example because the fiction intentionally wanted and built a young city, with some of the EPCOT feels of the setting an intentional planned commentary of a different sort than most of the space Gibson enjoyed inhabiting in his books. Gibson did his own bits of entirely new construction such as space stations, too, to make various points/contrasts. Corporations building modern "cyber" company cities is a rich tradition of its own in cyberpunk fiction, evoking and reminding readers/players of the past dystopian company towns that did exist in a previous American century and could easily exist again. https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City