Some cities were imagined, designed, and created wholly or partially in ways that forever shaped their histories and the identities, governments, religions, and economies of their citizens. To be clear, the extent that any city, city district, and city building, public space, or monument was designed and executed by people is the extent to which imagination and memory work need to be considered alongside the political, economic, and urban processes that produced the world's great places. In some ways, the foundations of Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Cahokia were very similar. All experienced intensive construction phases based to some extent on connections that people made between themselves and the cosmos. Archaeological excavations reveal that Jerusalem was already inhabited by the fourth millennium BCE. In some ways, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Cahokia all speak to the importance of founding moments. In other ways, the three occupy different positions along a politico-religious continuum. Jerusalem, with its centrality to three major religions, lies at one extreme.