On the one hand there is anxiety, uncertainty, fear, alienation (as Christopher notes, one tenet of noir is "nothing lasts"), while on the other hand, there is excitement, enthusiasm and joy (everything is possible). Noir films choose to examine the world inhabited by individuals who have the former reaction. In this world, industrialization creates a feeling of alienation and atomization (you're all alone--everyone must fend for himself). An increasingly mechanized world creates an increasingly dehumanized city. 

People in the noir city are alienated from each other, solitary, lonely. People are simply cogs in a giant machine (literally so in Chaplin's Modern Times). In the noir city there can be no individuality, nor any sense of personal power. All of the characters are in the grip of larger forces. Doomed. Hopeless. Helpless. The individual is being manipulated by events outside of his control. 

Noir films echo Greek tragedy: we are all playthings of the puppet masters. The individual in the noir city is trapped, and the only escape is death. The noir city itself is also trapped, in a world gone mad, and it too may only find escape through destruction.

The noir city, forming and reforming itself endlessly, like a substance under a microscope, is inevitably on a road to dissolution, the knowledge of which ticks at every moment in the hearts of it inhabitants." Christopher's favorite image, the noir city as a labyrinth, is apt. He presents the noir city as a maze, with the people within it trapped in a rat race. The city is a Kafkan nightmare, with millions of cells masquerading as offices.

A key symbol of the noir city is the office building, and the office towers that were built after the war were rather severe. Christopher cites historian Lewis Mumford, who describes the new type of office building as "symbolically a sort of vertical human filing case, with uniform windows, a uniform façade, uniform accommodations. Life is a hive of alienated beings in an alienating environment. The office building is a compressed, complex, tautly wired microcosm of the city.

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