It started as something small, insignificant. A seed dropped by chance, carried on the wind or by a bird that never knew the consequence of its delivery. It landed in the branches of something older, something rooted, something that had already fought to claim its space in the world. But the strangler fig doesn’t ask permission. It burrows in, sends down roots, wraps itself tighter. Slowly, patiently, it overtakes. The host remains standing long after it’s already dead, a hollowed-out husk encased in the living body of its conqueror.

I found this tree in Tangier’s old Medina, in a courtyard where time had folded in on itself, the walls leaning like they were listening to centuries of whispers. The tree’s massive roots spilled over the stone, curling like the limbs of something ancient and restless. The Kasbah loomed in the distance, a fortress against the inevitable. But there’s no real fortress against time, against nature, against the slow patience of the world reshaping itself. The strangler fig doesn’t conquer like men do. It doesn’t march. It doesn’t destroy. It simply waits. It climbs. It consumes without hurry, knowing that in the end, everything becomes soil.

I’ve been thinking about her ever since.

I’m here, sitting in my rented room in this old riad, a hidden sanctuary—its unassuming exterior concealing a courtyard of light, citrus-scented air, and the intricate craftsmanship of zellige tiles spilling across the floors in hypnotic mosaics, geometry meeting infinity. This place is an oasis, sealed off from time, where the world outside fades.

Two months in Tangier: I hold my own, writing every day, thriving in the solitude, yet feeling the same slow constriction of the strangler fig up in the Medina—not suffocating, but evolving. The first draft of Citizen One: Our Cities, Ourselves, and Our Uncertain Yet Extraordinary Future—my host tree—was never meant to survive in its original form. It was there to hold the shape, to give me something to work with. But now, the revisions have taken hold, demanding space, reshaping the structure, wrapping around every paragraph until the original skeleton is nearly unrecognizable.

Maybe every book overtakes its own foundation, feeding on what came before until what remains is something more intricate, more alive.

The podcast episodes I’ve been recording here, soon to be released, add another layer of roots, a different kind of growth extending in all directions. Every conversation, every recording session, winds deeper into the foundations of my consciousness, reshaping how I think about the project. Podcast conversations—like cities, like the strangler fig—grow unpredictably, taking on lives of their own. Maybe even a brief moment of contrast. Unlike writing, where revision strangles what came before, a conversation leaves everything intact—it just keeps growing outward.

Talking about Citizen One has made me see it as more than a reflection—it’s a living ecosystem of ideas, voices, contradictions. The more I examine it, the more I realize it was never just about smart cities or the future of urbanism. It’s about entanglement. The cities we build. The systems we get trapped inside. The myths we create and the ones that refuse to die.

The strangler fig has a place in myth. The world tree. The tree of knowledge. The tree of death and rebirth. In Hindu cosmology, the banyan—a cousin of the strangler—spreads so wide it creates entire forests, a symbol of interconnected worlds. In Buddhism, enlightenment came under the Bodhi tree, roots reaching deep into the unseen. And yet, in darker myths, trees like this are haunted, doorways to something hungry. In the stories of Southeast Asia, spirits linger in their tangled roots, whispering to those who come too close.

Islam, too, has something to say about trees. The Qur’an speaks of shajarat al-khuld, the Tree of Immortality, the one Adam and Hawa were forbidden to eat from, yet they did, setting everything in motion. It speaks of Sidrat al-Muntaha, the Lote Tree that marks the boundary of the seventh heaven: the farthest boundary, where human understanding ceases, where the Prophet Muhammad was granted visions beyond what words could hold. Trees mark thresholds in Islamic thought—the limits of human knowledge, the line between the seen and unseen, the point where revelation takes root.

And then there’s the Medina herself, the reason the old city survives. She wasn’t planned—she grew. Her streets are too tangled for invaders, too unpredictable for modern convenience, too deeply interwoven with history to be erased. This is what a city looks like when it grows like a strangler fig—layered, adapted, unplanned yet inevitable. The Kasbah was meant to be impenetrable, but history burrowed its way inside anyway, just as it always does. Just as it did in me.

I think about my time in NEOM. About how we tried to build something new, something unburdened by history. But history doesn’t work that way. It finds a way in. It drops its seeds into the cracks of ambition and certainty. It sends down roots. It reshapes what was meant to stand alone into something fused with everything that came before. NEOM was an idea before it was a place, a vision sketched out in master plans and digital renderings, where everything had a function, a purpose, a preordained efficiency. The city was meant to be engineered for the future, liberated from history—tabula rasa urbanism, a place where the past wouldn't weigh down the ambitions of tomorrow. Tangier, by contrast, was never planned—it was grown. The Medina is a tangle of passageways, centuries of improvisation solidified into stone and stucco. There are no clean lines, no symmetry—just centuries of adaptation, the residue of every civilization that’s tried to claim it.

That’s the difference. NEOM is a city of imposition. Tangier is a city of absorption. One forces itself into existence through calculation, the other accumulates existence through necessity. And yet, which one will truly endure? NEOM may be built to last, but will it ever carry the weight of belonging? The strangler fig survives because it takes root in what came before—Tangier has done the same for over a thousand years. The cities that survive are not the ones that erase history, but the ones that learn how to weave themselves into it.

Standing beneath the strangler fig in the Medina, I knew what I was looking at. Not just a tree. Not just a metaphor. But something eternal. A reminder. A warning, perhaps. 

This book, this podcast, this work I’ve been doing—it was never about building something from nothing. It was always about the entanglement. About what survives and what doesn’t. About how something new only thrives if it knows how to wrap itself around the past without being suffocated by it. Writing Citizen One was never about executing a rigid blueprint. If I had clung to the original draft, insisted on preserving its shape, it would have collapsed under its own weight—too brittle, too afraid to adapt. Books, like cities, have to be lived in, walked through, allowed to breathe and sprawl beyond the initial plan.

NEOM is being built from above; its every element is dictated before the first stone is laid. Perhaps there hasn’t been enough wandering yet, not enough organic mistakes, no moment where the city was simply allowed to find itself. But writing doesn’t work that way. Stories don’t grow under forced conditions. They need space for contradiction, for improvisation, for the messy entanglements that make them real. Tangier, like a manuscript rewritten over centuries, has been shaped by those who passed through it, each era leaving its mark without knowing what the final version would be.

Maybe that’s why the Medina feels more alive than any digital rendering of the city of the future. Maybe the best cities—like the best books—aren’t built. They are rewritten. 

The host tree is long dead, but the fig is alive. And maybe that’s how it has to be. Maybe that’s how it always was.