Ran across this, and the Ralph Steadman cover art compelled me to read it. Well, mostly skim it looking for interesting takes or authors I knew. Most of the contents are pretty dry urban planning, theorizing about megacities as if anyone would ever plan or fix anything instead of muddling along as we have for the last 50+ years, and too many essays analyzing Tokyo as if it was a petri dish. I note slightly amused/perturbed that none of the essays on urban design bring up civil defense, which is the reason most old cities had walls compressing core urban areas, and jagged streets to prevent enemy armies from marching straight in.
There's a Christopher Alexander essay "A City is Not a Tree" on designing cities as a "semi-lattice" (what comp sci would call a connected graph), with a fair amount of art and design logic in it; maybe there's some use for this? He admits by the end he has no practical examples of these already existing, except accidentally.
Marshall McLuhan's essay is brief, enigmatic, and maybe still relevant:
