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Someone I know received a cyber-postcard from a friend in Europe, captioned "New York 2006." (To view, click here.) The first thing you notice in this gag rendition of the Manhattan skyline is the big mosque in the center, roughly where the WTC towers were. Next you notice that there lots of minarets mingled with Western skyscrapers. The last you notice is the boat basin in the foreground--is this even New York? Obviously some Europeans are enjoying a little Photoshop humor at our expense, spinning a fantasy that is either vengeful or utopian, depending on how you look at it. The revenge fantasy is obvious: that we not only "lost the war" on terrorism, but surrendered to bin Laden, and our new Islamic masters have been gradually imposing their architecture on us. The utopian fantasy is that we saw the error of our ways, and adopted the architecture of the people we formerly exploited. (Yeah, right.)
Yet for either version to work, an "old world order" of city planning must still be in place. The theoretician Paul Virilio sees something very different looming on the horizon: "...I will underline that terrorism has just inaugurated an anti-cities strategy. This means that all towers are today threatened. Instead of being a place of dominion, as the dungeons of the past, the tower has become a place of weakness: vertically, it is henceforth the equivalent of the outer wall which the artillery blew up...." (Thanks to Jim's log for the quote.) The Japanese, who know something about collapsing cities, have been thinking along these lines for years, at least in their fantasy lives. In the 1995 anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, "Tokyo 3" has skyscrapers that sink into the ground whenever the city is threatened from the air (which is about every other episode). Not only do they sink, they continue downward in rectangular silos and emerge upside down on the roof of a "geofront," which is an enormous cavern with another city on its floor. Below is a view inside the geofront, after the buildings have been lowered:
In this scenario, Virilio's dungeon once again becomes a place of dominion, and the city doesn't have to give up its beloved skyscrapers!