The City We Became, a science-fiction novel, uses an extradimensional alien invasion of New York City to show how gentrification makes cities depressingly homogenous and destroys the idiosyncratic lifestyles they can offer residents. In the novel, great cities that “develop a unique enough culture” eventually come to life and choose a human avatar from among their residents to embody them. New York City is in the process of being born when extradimensional aliens, bent on preventing cities from coming alive, send an emissary known as the Woman in White to sabotage New York City’s birth. After fighting the Woman in White, New York City’s avatar falls into a coma—which, mysteriously, causes each of the city’s boroughs to choose an avatar of its own. As the avatars embodying New York City’s various boroughs investigate the Woman in White, they discover that she is using a nonprofit called the Better New York Foundation—itself owned by a mysterious global company called TOTAL MULTIVERSAL WAR, LLC—to gentrify various parts of the city: stealing Brooklyn brownstones from its original owners, Brooklyn Thomason and her family; pressuring Bronx art gallery director Bronca Siwanoy to take down photographs of local graffiti and put up pretentious, racist art by white men; razing a long-standing Bronx burger restaurant and evicting the people who lived above it to build expensive condos; and so on. The Woman in White also uses mysterious tendrils to infect both people and objects vulnerable to her influence. Notably, people and objects less connected to the essence of New York City are more vulnerable—so gentrification, by displacing long-term residents and local businesses in favor of transient professionals and multinational corporations like Starbucks, weakens New York City in the face of the Woman in White’s attacks. Thus, the novel uses an imaginative science-fictional premise to illustrate how gentrification makes cities less unique, resilient, and “alive.”
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Cities and Gentrification ThemeTracker
Cities and Gentrification Quotes in The City We Became
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering.
It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though.
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.
“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!”
Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.
Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.
The rest of her? Is as big as a city.
