INTEGRAL TENSION Imagining a Changed New York by Elijah TURNER
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As we face the threats and challenges of climate change, we are forced to reckon with and reimagine what cities are and what cities do. We must decide how our future will play out. To do so, we can mirror our ambitions, and even predict our successes and failures, by examining the art we make. Fictional narratives help us develop theories about our situation; the artists and storytellers frame the world and our place in it. We leave the theater and act the narratives out subconsciously, like a waking dream. For good or ill, we are empowered to choose which narratives, which theories, which futures we want to envision and enact. To that end, I hope the New York of the indefinite future turns out more like Star Trek than Neo Yokio. There are many examples of possible climate futures in popular media. In the last 15-20 years, the global scale disaster movie dominated our box offices and captured our imaginations in a visceral—if not nuanced—way. The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, San Andreas: these films all envision nature’s rebuke to man-made meddling as cataclysms of Biblical proportions. Another pervasive concern is escape. Herbert’s Dune series, Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Cameron’s Avatar—stories like these present an urban polity that has (all but) deserted our home world, resigned to the stars. We see these narratives reproduced in our emergent behavior. They didn’t listen to the scientists in The Day After Tomorrow, so we don’t listen to our scientists now. SpaceX and Blue Origin are racing to Mars—bonus points to the first one to reach the asteroid belt. Class-conscious climate narratives are especially important as we try to imagine what socioeconomics will look like in a post-impact city. Will people be able to live in city systems that have irreversibly changed due to a range of issues, including but not limited to wildfires, drought, hurricanes, sea level, and cosmic radiation exposure? If so, What kind of people will remain in these cities? Examples that consider class dynamics in a realistic way tend to include a
great deal of death, as in Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan. We do not often see similar considerations of class portrayed more positively in media, perhaps because this feels euphemistic, like daydreaming about the best possible ways one could die. We fear our speculation—no matter how light-hearted—will fulfill itself as prophecy. The importance of engaging in this cheerily morbid exercise of imagining the best-possible-worstcase-scenario is that of planning ahead, hedging against incalculable looming externalities as the geology and ecology of our world changes, unbalanced by human hands. The optimism inherent in this exercise is that of survival, as we assume that humanity will last at city scale. Ezra Koenig’s Neo Yokio and Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek are two relatively positive survivalist class-conscious narratives about human societies that have responded to our climate realities in very different ways. In the Netflix original animated satire Neo Yokio, the title is the setting for the drama, analogous to a futuristic, fantastical New York City. The story follows Kaz Khan, a young socialite, bachelor, and magical exorcist—derogatorily referred to as nouveau riche “rat-catchers” by the city’s old money, due to their status as magical immigrants to Neo Yokio. He vies for the title of #1 Bachelor against his arch rival Arcangelo. Notably, the characters in the show— Kaz, his robot servant, his friends and family, his exorcism clients, his rival—are all wealthy. Most of the action centers on issues of class and status: who is the most eligible bachelor? Should my date to the gala wear the Fendi bag or the Celine? Why not both! The Long Island branch of the family is so gauche and vulgar. Equally notable, everything south of 14th St. in Manhattan is submerged beneath the waves, as the title of the first episode suggests: “The Sea Beneath 14thSt.” This leads us back to the original questions: what is this city, this Neo Yokio? What does it do? It is home to wealthy people who
