David Kishik, a professor at Boston's Emerson College, is known, among other things, for his experiments in fictional philosophy, which take as their starting point an "alternative fact"—what might have happened if...

In his book "The Manhattan Project: A Theory of the City," this "fact" becomes the successful escape of Walter Benjamin to the United States, where his famous project "The Arcades," dedicated to Paris—the capital of the 19th century, finds continuation in the context of New York from the 1940s to the 1980s. Through Benjamin's sensitive lens, we observe how concrete streets and skyscrapers, graffiti and suburban dreams, sandwich men and the homeless, and "geniuses of place"—Woody Allen, Robert Moses, Andy Warhol, Rem Koolhaas, Hannah Arendt, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Gould—come together to form a mental map of the 20th-century capital, New York.

Using three axes—reality/fantasy, politics/economics, heaven/hell—on which there is room for any elements of a big city, Kishik crafts his New York "fictional philosophy" and selects metaphors of modernity from the second third of the 20th century, feeling out a manifesto of urban revolution in the "chaotic and fragmentary urban happening."