The idea I'm going for is the lack of foresight and the inability to really understand what it is they are actually doing and instead going for grandiose gestures to show how powerful they are (don't think we didn't see the flying trees in that city or in Mao's case how insane it was to kill birds instead of just building enclosures or something). They're doing this to look cool

In this case, this city isn't even meant to help agriculture so that definitely wasn't the angle I was going for. The city is meant to preserve nature... even though it kills the birds... who are apart of nature. Kinda like how Mao killed the birds to preserve his agriculture... even though those birds were a net positive to his agriculture (and this is ignoring the egoism of the "smash sparrow" campaign which we shouldn't ignore because both the campaign and the city are very egotistical in presentation; the smash sparrow stuff was apart of a an extermination list of 3 other creatures, flies, rats, and mosquitoes but since it was hard to kill those, they just went for sparrows apparently)