The Manhattan Project. Theory of the City

David Kishik — a professor at Boston's Emerson College, known among other things for his experiments in fictional philosophy, where the starting point is an «alternative fact», what could have happened if… In the book "The Manhattan Project. Theory of... the City", such a «fact» becomes Walter Benjamin's successful escape to the USA, where his famous Passages project, dedicated to Paris — the capital of the 19th century, continues with the material of New York from the 1940s to the 1980s. Through the sensitive Benjaminian optics, we observe how concrete streets and skyscrapers, graffiti and suburban dreams, sandwich people and homeless individuals, «geniuses of place» — Woody Allen, Robert Moses, Andy Warhol, Rem Koolhaas, Hannah Arendt, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Gould… — are woven into a mental map of the 20th century capital, New York. Using three axes — reality/fantasy, politics/economics, paradise/hell, — on which there is room for any elements of a big city, Kishik composes his New York «fiction»-philosophy and selects metaphors of modernity from the second third of the 20th century, feeling out in the «chaotic and fragmented urbanistic happening» a manifesto of urban revolution.