What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? ...The fact that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too "small" to be inhabited and shared by those alive. We ourselves exhaust it.

The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. Some continents, like Asia, aspire to the Generic City; others are ashamed by it. In the Generic City individual "moments" are spaced far apart to create a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences: the color variations in the flourescent lighting of an office building just before sunset, the subtleties of the slightly different whites of an illuminated sign at night. Like Japanese food, the sensations can be reconstituted and intensified in the mind, or not - they may simply be ignored. This pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent drug: it induces a hallucination of the normal.

The Generic City is fractal, an endeless repetition of the same simple structural module; it is possible to reconstruct it from the smallest entity.

The Generic City, Rem Koolhaas