Living in a new New York

Thomas Dyja imagines the future of cities in uncertain times

New York is the most populous city in the United States

As we enter a very, very uncertain time, it’s clear that the city I live in, New York City, is going to become an ark, as will other big cities around the world. The water is rising — literally — and forces are on the march that explicitly target the kinds of diversity, freedom, and creative chaos that urban centres produce. The UN estimates some 70% of us will be living in cities by 2050; it’s time to prepare and that means more than bike lanes. To paraphrase Richard Sennett, we need to start seeing our cities as lifeboats and not ocean liners. We need to decide what we’re going to keep onboard to survive.

What of New York City are we going to bring into the future? We’ve learned some hard and ultimately positive lessons here about preservation, between the machinations of master planner Robert Moses and the tragic demolition of Pennsylvania Station back in 1963. Landmarking, reuse, and reimagination of buildings and neighbourhoods were all essential tools in the city’s post-Fiscal Crisis reinvention; it’s a given now that the landscape of the past plays an active role in whatever comes next. We’ve preserved a lot of buildings, torn down a lot more, and the result is a New York that is still New York — loud and crowded, super-charged, welcoming, always in search of the new, famous as far back as the early 1700s for people who talked fast and interrupted. Throw greedy, cruel, and vain in there, too. Every city has its own understanding of its own particular character, not just cultural habits but how we interact in urban space, and preservation now means preserving that, how we live in our cities: Our values, how we defend expression and push limits; the freedom and respect we accord each other as we rub shoulders on the subway and try not to hear our neighbours through the common wall.

Two things New York doesn’t need to bring into the future are Little Island and the Vessel, two Thomas Heatherwick confections fobbed off on us in the name of tourism, two fake destinations. One is a runaway bit of Disney World and the other is an Escher nightmare come to life, poorly conceived and ugly beyond words. I have a hard time saying anything bad about tourists because I love being one, and in New York tourism has been a sponge for unskilled workers after the loss of our manufacturing base. But absurdly expensive follies like these — together they cost half a billion dollars — have sent the message that New York is more interested in serving tourists than we are in taking care of each other. Tourists come to this city to be a part of us, to live for a while in wonder of this hive of imperfect humanity constantly, energetically, and (mostly) peaceably getting on with it the way they want to get it on; to see the buildings we live and work in, the parks we play in, the places we eat, the shows we see; to experience what is unique about everyday life in this city. However insulting the aggressive anti-tourism sentiment in places like Barcelona and Venice can seem, cities need to protect themselves from tourism at least as much as they promote it, and at the very least not pander to it at the cost of their citizens.