MANHATTAN YORK

New York is a state of mind, they say. If that is true, this state has been reached by the majority of our planet’s inhabitants. Even those living on the other hemisphere are visiting this city at least several times a month – watching favourite TV series, keeping track of the news from Wall Street, skimming through a niche art magazine. It is significant, that a t-shirt with the inscription “I ? NY” can be bought both in Paris and Ulan Bator. For its residents, New York is a real place, where it is possible to be born and die and in the end it is all decidedly less funny as it appears to be in Woody Allen movies. For the rest of the world – NY is like a blurry photo, a snapshot with Statue of Liberty, Broadway and Brooklyn Bridge in the background.

This is how it looks now. Now, that is, in that recent past we all still manage to remember. What we do not remember is an Indian tipi seeded in place of the Rockefeller Center. Hunting in Central Park. Tanning leather on the 5th Avenue. Meat roasted over a fire for breakfast at Tiffany’s. About the past they have told us at school. About the future they tell a lot on TV. If you sometimes only glance at infobar in the news, you excellently know that in addition to financial crisis, wars, famine and poverty await us also depletion of natural resources, global warming and rising sea levels. Have you already prepared for this? Because we have.

Relax. Imagine a calm tract of an endless ocean. In the middle of it, bathed in the delicate sunbeams, drifts Manhattan, separated from the rest of lands. When those disappear under the surface of increasingly surging water, Manhattan, as the biblical Ark, will shelter on its board people and animals. It will become a self-sufficient island, producing food and energy. When survival will be the aim – and banks, multi-national companies, shopping malls or entertainment districts will no longer be needed, the only thing left from the old reality would be the costume of urban architecture. The city will get recycled – buildings, like packages, will fill with new functions. A luxurious 200-square-meter apartment for a single will easily accommodate a few families with their whole belongings. Elegant glazed department store may turn out to be the perfect place for a greenhouse vegetable cultivation. Ghosts from the past will come back, Manhattan will again transform into a settlement, with the economy based on work of human hands. But in your life, something more will change. Instead of going for a morning jogging – you will graze the cattle. After tiring, lasting for hours work in the field, you will probably not have any power to drop in for your weekly session with a therapist. What is more – problems with self-assertion and suffocated ego will disperse miraculously, as soon as you will face the problems with weaving on a loom. If a child is born to you, forget about adding photos to facebook. You will need to butcher a pig and invite all the neighbours. And please note – a chat with friends over a cup of goat milk may be just as absorbing as over a café latte.

Obviously, that “going back to nature” does not need to look so optimistic. Perhaps we are already cyborgs, permanently interwoven with our comfortable, high-tech life. Accustomed, that the city is a machine to satisfy all of our needs, of course only if we are able to pay for it. Confrontation with a sustainable city, understood as a living organism, where to get anything, first you have to give something from yourself, may surpass us. But there is a glimmer of chance that we can handle that challenge. Thus, maybe it is worthwhile to let the future sink and go on a cruise in the past on Manhattan Ark?