The City We Became implicitly argues that to be great, a city must foster good art. In the science-fictional world of the novel, great cities—that is, cities with sufficiently distinctive histories and cultures—come alive and choose one of their human residents as their avatar. Internally diverse New York City actually chooses six avatars: a primary avatar representing the whole city, and five avatars representing each of its boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island). Notably, several of the humans who represent the city’s essence are current or former artists: New York City’s avatar is a graffiti artist; the Bronx’s avatar Bronca paints murals and directs the Bronx Art Gallery; and Brooklyn’s avatar Brooklyn is a former rapper who performed under the stage name MC Free. Their art helps them strengthen the city, find each other, and protect themselves from attacks. New York City’s avatar paints graffiti throats that help the city breathe as it begins to come alive; a mural of Bronca’s representing the city enables Brooklyn and Manhattan’s avatar Manny to identify her; and Brooklyn uses her battle rap skills to channel the power of her borough, protecting her family when extradimensional alien creatures attack them. Moreover, when the extradimensional alien attempting to destroy New York City, the Woman in White, seeks to weaken the city ahead of her final attack, she tries to undermine its art scene: posing as a potential donor to the Bronx Art Gallery, she tries to bribe the board to take down art by New York City’s avatar and replace it with technically incompetent, overtly racist pieces. By implying that art can make a city strong—but bad, bigoted art makes it weak—The City We Became argues that a city needs to nurture good art in order to become great.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Art ThemeTracker
Art Quotes in The City We Became
Back when I was in school, there was an artist who came in on Fridays to give us free lessons in perspective and lighting and other shit that white people go to art school to learn. Except this guy had done that, and he was Black. I’d never seen a Black artist before. For a minute I thought I could maybe be one, too.
It is the other place. The other him. The city he has become. New York City, as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage in this reality. He understands, suddenly, why he has seen that other place as empty; it isn’t. The people are there, but in spirit—just as New York City itself has a phantom presence in the lives of every citizen and visitor. Here in this strange, abstract mural, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.
And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this.
That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.
“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
“The Better New York Foundation—”
“Jesus, really?”
“Yes. Very well resourced, very private, and very dedicated to raising the city from its gritty image to the heights of prosperity and progress.”
Bronca actually pulls the receiver from her ear to glare at it for a moment. “I have never smelled a pile of bigger horseshit. That’s—” She shakes her head. “It’s gentrifier logic. Settler logic. They want the city without the ‘gritty’ people who make it what it is!”
