All this is SO FAIR as a critique! Man, I wish so much that there had been more/different worldbuilding around how and why this happens to different cities; in our book group today we were talking a little (partially inspired in thought by some of the comments above also) about how neat this would be, conceptually, as kind of a shared creative work where different authors got to write about their own cities -- someone from Buenos Aires writes the Buenos Aires book, someone from Mexico City the Mexico City book -- and obviously that's an entirely different kind of project, but how cool to let all these cities be just as special, in their own ways!