It is a city, a civitas, Sean Hannan argues, but perhaps we’d do better to look for a model of such a city not in New York or Milan but in the refugee camps in our world today, each its own metropolis: “Think of Dadaab in Kenya (population: 245,000), Bidi-Bidi in Uganda (285,000), and (somewhat closer to Augustine’s Thagaste) the Sahrawi camps in the Algerian Maghreb (50,000–100,000, depending on which authority you consult).”
