THE BRAND NEW YORK JOURNAL

THE BRAND NEW YORK JOURNAL Sunday, June 3, 2026 ”The anti-capitalist Bacterium. The New Cellular Metropolis. ….All the world is crying for the death of New York. The economical crisis started in 2008 has eroded first its social life and then also its physical structure. All beams, concrete walls, glass windows have magically disappeared…and many other Cities in all the world seem to follow the same destiny. As for instance the Void Metabolists have already denounced during the Venice Biennale in 2010, the urban structure of New York was the symbol of the rise of the authority of Capitalism in XX Century. With the end of Capitalism also its most representative symbol is dissolved, destroyed by its failure.

Thus an international group of Anti-capitalists have engaged some Soviet scientists who are now reproducing the New York grid with its Skyscrapers in a miniaturized model, inside a culture plate. They are trying to reproduce a farming of bacteria inside the most powerful capitalist structure, in order to find a vaccine, an anti-capitalist bacterium.

The experiment reminds old science fiction movies, such as “Fantastic Voyage” directed in 1966, where a miniaturized crew is injected inside a human body. Sixty years later, microbiology and urbanism have become the same discipline, transforming some of the most incredible fantasies of Asimov in necessary design processes for the survival of humans.

The Soviet Scientists have reduced NY in a single culture plate or in several ones which form all together the Manhattan Island, in order to make more experiments in different parts of the city.

The former solution seems however the most intriguing. Indeed the Scientists have reinterpreted a project for New York proposed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960`s: it is a geodetic dome which should have covered all Midtown Manhattan with a width of 3.2 kilometers and now it`s covering the miniaturized capitalist city with a cell membrane, with a width of 3.2 centimeters.

Under the Fullerian Cellular dome, several bacteria, virus, membranes,…are interacting with capitalist structure of the city. The Scientists are daily observing inside the dome, looking for the best anti-capitalist bacterium which better survives inside the urban structure of the culture plate.

Scientists are optimists saying that this anti-capitalist bacterium will save all the world: it will be reproduced in all laboratories in the world and then injected as vaccine to all 2 billions of living humans left. “Nobody is going to die anymore because of the capitalist disease” – they say.

Only one perplexity is rising in some architects. The scientists have called the new anti-capitalist culture plate as “the new cellular metropolis”. It has the same name of the city model proposed in the 1960`s by the ‘mall maker’ Victor Gruen (Hardwick, 2004), the inventor of the regional commercial centre, which is the Dome of Consumerism and Capitalism itself.

If the same references are used for opposite ideologies, then are we sure to expect better changes and positive results from this new anti-capitalist experiment?…”