New Urban Arcadia

New York is neither dream nor reality. It is hyperreality, a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Jean Baudrillard Centuries earlier, New Yorkers would recall this time—their imminent future—during an autumn’s premature snowfall or a summer’s first thunderstorm; in early mornings, awoken by the cry of a seagull; on weekends, barefoot in Sheep’s Meadow; with soiled hands in rooftop gardens; or with the scent of herbs at farmers’ markets; before the silverback gorillas in the Museum of Natural History; or during the cosmic sunset of Manhattanhenge. What they believed to be nostalgic reveries for lost nature were, in fact, prescient hallucinations: the wilderness of their ancestral habitat was to return.

No, the apocalypse never arrived. Civilization would not fall; the metropolis would not crumble. But nor would nature. Decline she most certainly did… but a resurrection awaited! Everything, it was ultimately acknowledged, can have a second birth: the eternal birth of the simulacrum. It’s never too late to revive your origins!

Liberated to design a new environment, New Yorkers embraced a bold strategy: why choose between city and nature when one could have both? Why limit oneself to a native ecology when one could import the exotic and foreign? For that matter, why limit oneself to just one ecology?

…Thus did New Yorkers spend their working hours within environmentally conditioned towers of glass; their mirrored surfaces reflecting an Edenic landscape of chaste forests. Life in New York has become, once again, spontaneously fictional, transcending even the imaginary by fashioning from our Arcadian dreams a new reality.