Time is used in Fedora as an inevitable agent in shaping people’s perceptions and ideas of the city as well as an obstacle to the desired changes in the city that exist in its inhabitants’ imaginations. The creation of the blue globes is someone’s hopeful imagination of a utopic Fedora, but in the time they used to create it, the city changes drastically causing their future to be restrained to a glass globe. In this sense, their realization becomes invalid both through the warping of their perceptions of what the city could be due to the new image of a changed Fedora and in the impossibility of completing their imagined reality because of physical changes in the city. In this sense time stomps out a branch of what Fedora could have been, as the city evolves into following another path while the creator envisions creating a unique branch of their own.
Time also functions as something that results in the preservation of ideas and beliefs of what Fedora should be. This is done through the use of a museum with the globes, displaying the immortalized visions of Fedora. In a contradictory manner, Marco Polo also hints at time not necessarily being a hindrance or an obstacle resulting in the death of Fedora’s realities, as he notes that these visions are as “equally real” as the stone Fedora of today. This is because the Fedora of today was created or shaped when it was “accepted as necessary” but “not yet so,” as it too existed as an imagined reality before its completion. In this sense, Fedora’s inhabitants’ imagined city is also possible as they all existed at one point as “assumptions” along with the big, stone Fedora.