New York 2140: Climate Change and Gentrification in Tomorrow's Ruined New Yorks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ruins, from the perspective of capitalists, are sites where exchange value has collapsed. At the same time, the infrastructural residues of once-productive landscapes present opportunities for those who wish to live outside of the logic of the commodity society. In the latter half of the twentieth century, large swaths of New York City were ruined as sites for capital accumulation and its distinctive forms of social reproduction. Reinvestment was accompanied by a series of political clashes theorized as the “revanchist” city. As climate change proceeds, the prospect of a newly ruined New York City becomes more concrete. I explore the prospects for ruination and reinvestment through the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose 2017 novel New York 2140 depicts a struggle over the regentrification of Manhattan following a series of catastrophic climate events. In the novel, Robinson posits a dialectic of social struggle that resolves into a kind of post-apocalyptic social democracy. The ending of New York 2140, I argue, reflects the impasse in which thinkers and militants who are trying to think about the problem of transition find themselves in an era without a clear revolutionary subject, where reform appears less as a confident triumph than the last-gasp effort to avert total catastrophe.