In a diffuse city, Largo has a nucleating effect.
But the degree of federal oversight in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city, stands out, and the latest threat landed with a particular thud in a sprawling, diffuse city that seems forever at pains to create any unifying or galvanizing sense of itself.
In recent decades, the planning agenda has become more diffuse as cities have become more competitive, socially divided, and unmanageable.
But you won't be able to figure out how Stow Wengenroth (1906-1978), the Brooklyn-born master lithographer, managed to bring the diffuse haze of city streetlamps on a damp night to a sheet of inked paper.
"The She-Wolf" has always been a symbol of the Eternal City, diffused throughout the ancient world by Roman coins bearing the image.
As a result, the typical, densely packed metropolis of 1900 has become a diffuse agglomeration of old city centre, rich suburbs and then even-lower-density, semi-urban exurbs, where every house sits on its own little prairie.
There are many places in Cairo where the noise of the city is diffused into an ambient hum.
As the maps below show, in London ethnic minorities have diffused from inner-city boroughs such as Newham (1) and Tower Hamlets (2) into farther-out places like Barking and Dagenham (3).
Perhaps, but in a wholly urban sense: dense, saturated with diffuse light and sound, the city's pulse never subdued.
In a city as vast, diffuse, and diverse as Istanbul, with so many enclaves and populations and interests and classes, and with such imperfect freedom of the press, gauging public opinion, or even current events, can be fantastically difficult.
Transplant patients are a diffuse group spread across a city of over 12 million people afflicted by other health concerns; it is difficult for small patient groups to organize and effectively demonstrate any degree of power in influencing policies in Mumbai.
