So you know those scale-model Dickensian villages that pop up this time of year in store windows or on holiday-themed merchandise display tables? The ones that most kitsch-averse people would describe as cloyingly precious, [. . .] Um, well … the thing is … I love those. I always have. As a kid, I would make my whole family stop our Christmas shopping whenever we came across one of these tiny, twee tableaux. [. . .] Then I’d be jolted back to 1970s Dallas, Texas, as my family and I zig-zagged through the massive shopping-mall parking lot in search of our car. [. . .] There’s a reason, I think, that human beings—wherever they happen to live—dream about disappearing into the inviting setting of an urban village, be it real and historic or fake and kitschy . In the visual shorthand of our collective unconscious, the scene functions as a reliable stand-in for our much more abstract and hard-to-define concept of commu...