Invisible cities 1: Dukuria

In Dukuria, whether by principle, or by diktat, the traders believe in fair competition. They feel that, to give the best customer service, no trader should sell more than one thing, and the trader should know everything about that one thing. Furthermore, whether out of loneliness in their field of knowledge, or, again, of principle, the traders of any one thing have all decided to set up their shops together.

Thus, in Dukuria, we find grouped together in one street, all the sellers of eggs, and in another, the cobblers, and in a third, the sellers of forks, and over there, behind the gates, the sellers of gold. The inhabitants of Dukuria walk many miles when shopping, but they are always sure of the finest and freshest produce.

Each street of commerce has its own means of decoration. In the Street of the Eggs, we see the eggs piled high in pyramids, like crystal, speckled, and glued together with bird-shit and straw. In the Street of Kittens, balconies lean towards the middle of the street like old women conversing on a bus, and from underneath their wooden struts are hung cages filled with mewling animals.

In the street of books, the lined shelves within, seen dimly from the outside through convex, bulging window panes, are currently source of controversy. The booksellers of Dukuria had felt ashamed of the great variety of their stock, and have divided the books up into sections delineated 'History', 'Science Fiction', 'Home Improvement' and so forth. A younger set feel that this is under-specialization, and wish to limit each shop to one book, and one book alone, citing simplification of choice. The debate continues.

The short street of jazz cafes - a tiny cul-de-sac, in reality - is mercifully close to the street of pubs, which is often surrounded by yellow-jacketed police on a Saturday night, and unfortunately far from the district of instruments, where the avenue of music teachers is to be found.

The knowledge of each commodity is handed down from parent to offspring, and so, the child being nursed by the woman selling eggs will grow up herself to be an egg seller. Sometimes fortuitous marriages are arranged between streets, so, for example, a girl child from the street of oranges may marry a boy child from the street of water, and thereafter, the young couple becomes eligible to take up a stall in the street of orange juice sellers. In this way technological advances are made, such as when a child from the street of cameras was wedded to another from the street of phone calls. When commodities become old, or unfashionable, their streets fall quiet, the vendors disappearing one by one, the shop-lights turning dark, and the windows shattering in the night. These streets may become inhabited by the lowest of the low, the specialized charity shop owners, who are looked down by the sellers of all the other commodities, before becoming re-colonized by the young and just married; sellers of newly-thought-of things. Slowly, the city changes and grows.

Everyone in Dukuria is a vendor, taking time away from their own selling to support the selling of others. In this way, money circulates and, because all the vendors of Dukuria are honest, the total value of all things neither rises nor falls, although the amount of money in the city is always increasing, a circumstance that the vendors of Dukuria pride themselves upon.

Communication with outsiders is the task of a select class of vendors: The sellers of iron, wood, bricks, and all of the inhabitants of the streets in the district of food. Thus, the inhabitants of Dukuria, on the whole, lead untroubled lives, un-curious as to the state of affairs outside the gates of the city, and able to devote themselves to improvements in the art of egg selling, for example. An outsider in the city is required to buy and sell for each day that he or she stays, although she or he is only allowed to do this via the people of the streets of iron, wood, bricks and food. The population of Dukuria are content to live there, and those in the streets of iron, wood, brick and food strive to preserve this state of affairs.