Thanks a bunch for linking this. I had similar ideas doing system architecture, quit my job after seeing those concepts at work and after some years actually started writing a presentation with the city being a single entity for my hometown. Both the article and the book are for sure some reassurance for me i wasn't abstracting into madness ;)

It's an old mockup, please don't laugh - i soon hit walls and wrote my own n-dim graph engine since then: https://der-chemnitz.de/indexold.html

In my city this is kinda easy as the river is 1:1 named to the city, so any links between nature and human culture is faster to process.

Traditional engines proved unfit so i stubbornly continued working on a webgpu one allowing nestable entities for definition of laws across branches / groups in the graph. The graph is handed to compute shaders and calculates the world matrix for the scene tree per frame. Allows for portals too, etc.

Here's a demo of it doing 4D entities to animated 3D and the graph engine building a scaled universe without a fixed reference frame (dono if that's the right word, it just means there are no fixed world units or global grid, it's always derived from your position in the graph): https://krei.se/vid/demofinal.mp4

This is also halted for now as i'll go with Rust instead of TS in the future and handle the main graph logic on a central server handing out only trees to clients (similar to how ARMA and Battlespace works from what i read).

I'm not sure what i will get from the book, but if someone is poking similar ideas i'm always open for dialogue and/or wish you plenty luck and the best on this interesting journey!