Huxley's Brave New world?

Rand might have seen it as the free market with skyscrapers and the greenies and communists scraping along without progress the in the foreground.

I see that I'd be very happy living OUTSIDE those walls...

It depresses me. What the heck is it. Who would live in an area like this. I don't appreciate impressionism.

I imagine the artist is drawing the juxtaposition of an old-fashioned village with a futuristic megatropolis, as seen by a someone in the old-fashioned village. The citizen of the old-fashioned village sees the metropolis as polluting and uncaring, endless skyscrapers with endless offices and apartments, a meaningless life with nothing sacred. The actual artist, I imagine, is just depicting that old town’s point of view. The artists sees things from metropolis’ point of view.

The modern city looks clean. The amount of pollution is nothing compared to the number of people those buildings hold. The water pouring out isn’t visibly dark. In the village, everyone has to agree on things to get along, but the modern city is big enough for different ways of doing things even within the same skyscraper. You can see limitless possibilities, along the lines of what Rand described in The Romantic Manifesto or what Thomas Friedman described in The Lexus and the Olive Tree.