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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner

Checker-City  
  A city planned as a checker-board of alternating vegetation and buildings.  

They dropped through the mists of the planet’s upper atmosphere and had glimpses from time to time of a yellow and black checkered plain below. They shot down through the last mists to find themselves less than a mile over this plain. March and Connor and Newell exclaimed in their surprize. The plain was a city!

It was an immense yellow and black checker-city, the yellow squares being blocks of thick yellow vegetation carefully tended, and the black squares being blocks of cubical black buildings. This strange checker-city of vegetation and buildings stretched from horizon to horizon of the world under them.

Its inhabitants, they saw as they dropped lower, were innumerable bronze-skinned men and women. Many thronged the ways of the building-squares, while as many others worked in the vegetation-squares at the cultivation of the growths there. A few oval ships were in sight over the city, most of them near a block that held the largest blade buildings. Toward this the cruiser’s escorting ships were leading it.

The cruiser came to rest with the oval ships about it on the black plaza surrounding these large central buildings...

He led down to the space-doors, spinning open inner and outer ones, and they stepped out onto the plaza’s seamless black paving...

When they had passed out of the two suns’ blaze of light and heat into the cool dimness of the great cube-building, Jurn led them to the black-walled, high-win- dowed chambers that were to be theirs.

Technovelgy from The Star-Roamers, by Edmond Hamilton.
Published by Weird Tales in 1933
Additional resources -

Compare to the town in one city from When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) by H.G. Wells and the cubic city from The Cubic City (1929) by Louis Tucker.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Star-Roamers
  More Ideas and Technology by Edmond Hamilton
  Tech news articles related to The Star-Roamers
  Tech news articles related to works by Edmond Hamilton

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