5 minute read
Integral Tension
INTEGRAL TENSION Imagining a Changed New York by Elijah TURNER 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 24
can afford to live on receding luxury real estate, or else people who can afford to live beneath the waves (oxygen tanks? personal submersibles?). Resident occupations include pop star, heir and/or heiress, fashion guru, and private demon exorcist. The unthinkably wealthy and techno-magically enabled inhabitants of this city fret and concern over the finer things in life while half the city rests beneath the tide. Poor people are represented in the city insofar as they are necessary to labor in the service class and earn a living supporting the rich by refereeing and commentating on bouts of gentlemen’s field hockey or working the sales floor of Bergdorf. Koenig’s satire has a cutting edge to it, a stab in the ribs delivered with a goofy, glittery, anime wink. If we ignore the magic and robots, we see an eerily imminent (not so) alternate reality. New York’s poor and low-income residents have already been radically displaced in processes of development and gentrification. If sea levels rise and New York begins to flood, it is easily imaginable that the highest value property owners subsume the remainder of the city and divvy up the offal among the highest bidders. Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath provide a sobering example. In contrast, I would argue that we should attempt to adhere to the climate narrative described in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise. The Earth of Star Trek is composed of agrarian urbanities, toeing the line between arable farmland and dense technological city centers. There is certainly social stratification, but scientific and technological breakthroughs have flattened the worst of human poverty and inequality. It seems everyone has some opportunity to work. The global government has erected weather towers that geoengineer the earth’s climate to a dynamic equilibrium. Social progress has also engendered cultural advances. People express their heritage without being discriminated against on that basis, at least within our species. However lofty or unrealistic the goal may be, the narrative remains useful to inform steps we currently could—and arguable should—be taking to stave off the worst damage of climate change, to create a peaceful and cohesive human society. We can’t use geoengineering to stop storms quite yet, but we can adapt our social practices and built environments to cope with a changing world. We can design flood proof public spaces that use clever tech and simple physics to retain and drain water before it reaches people’s homes. We can revolutionize public transportation and drastically reduce carbon emissions by investing in nationwide high speed rail and advanced electronic vehicles. We can create laws that protect poor people in cities from displacement, climategenerated or otherwise. It might actually be possible to geoengineer our climate. To find out, we must commit ourselves to the type of narrative we want to follow into the future.
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