Those high rises are faceless, there's no balcony, the windows are often opaque, you can't see what goes on inside. It's very dehumanized, especially at night. There's this place underground, and then there's the La Défense square, where no one lives, it's only offices and it's only people working there and so there's no one to hear from their windows. You might not be able to call someone for help because there's no one. You can meet the wrong kind of person and here's no way out. I don't know if you've seen this movie called "Irréversible" by Gaspard Noé? In a nutshell it's a horrible movie where a woman gets raped in a tunnel below the street. Back then it was kind of sketchy There were high rises, tunnels and dark places at night. We'd gone to La Défense when it starts to be dodgy. It must have been at the beginning of the 90s. I remember one time, one of my friend's mothers was really angry because we'd gone to La Défense without telling her. “En fait je me souviens par exemple d’une fois où…” As a teenager, Alice was told to stay away from La Défense but it became a thrilling but terrifying playground for her and her friends. However, the idea of a district where no one lived, that was completely abandoned after working hours lead some to feel insecure there. It’s impossible to walk the city streets and not be neck deep in the fragments of ideal cities dreamed up by emperors, artists, bureaucrats, environmentalists, and most importantly, citizens. Utopias of morality, technology, health, and much more… Plans for the aristocracy, for the poor, for police, for immigrants and on and on and on. So it will come as no surprise to you that Paris, a city that is roughly two thousand years old, has had many many many plans for urban utopias. Okay, so last episode we left off talking about Grand Paris, the plan to breach the urban borders of the city and unit Paris with its surrounding banlieue through huge infrastructure projects. So we'll proceed business as usual and see what happens. Okay, you might notice that I have a bit of a deeper baritone in this episode. The comedy is very sophisticated and usually revolves around Tony or Nat's endless frustrations and "face-palms" - real or implied.This is Here There Be Dragons. These storylines are set within a public-service type office filled with other characters who are either barely competent at their roles or easily distracted with all sorts of HR issues, WHS or professional development things going on in the background. The plot ines of each episode usually revolve around the two "doers" trying to actually get a project started and in motion set against the spin doctors quite narrow agendas of producing over-hyped media events and distracting "new ideas". It pits a pragmatist (Tony - Rob Sitch, head of the NBA) and a realist (Nat - Celia Pacquola) against self centred spin-doctors (Rhonda - Kitty Flanagan, media manager) and (Jim - Anthony Lehmann government liaison). In the tradition of The Hollowment, Utopia is set in the offices of the fictional "Nation-Building Authority" - a semi autonomous government authority charged with co-ordinating and facilitating infra-structure on behalf of the government.
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