Ideas don’t develop — they agglomerate in a repetitive, undifferentiated jumble, and the power they might have drains away.

Taken together, they depict a wildly aspirational luxury metropolis that seems to have tipped over without warning into “Blade Runner” dystopia, a city agglomerating by algorithm, recalling a line from J.G.

The old model of urban economics, agglomerated vertically in a clutch of downtown skyscrapers, has gradually ceded to a broader vision of mobility, remote access and live-work neighborhoods.

This view, that the agglomerate of earth and water was not a perfect sphere, was universally accepted in the later Middle Ages, and the new cosmography required its refutation.

For instance, it’s still unclear how solid material agglomerates into planet-sized pieces.