David Kishik is a professor at Boston's Emerson College, known, among other things, for his experiments in fictional philosophy, the starting point of which is an 'alternative fact'—what might have happened if... In his book 'The Manhattan Project: A Theory of the City,' this 'fact' is Walter Benjamin's successful escape to the United States, where his famous project, 'Passages,' dedicated to Paris, the capital of the 19th century, is continued with material from New York City in the 1940s–1980s. Through Benjamin's sensitive lens, we observe how concrete streets and skyscrapers, graffiti and suburban dreams, sandwich people and the homeless, 'genius loci'—Woody Allen, Robert Moses, Andy Warhol, Rem Koolhaas, Hannah Arendt, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Gould...—come together to form a mental map of the capital of the 20th century, New York. Using three axes—reality/fantasy, politics/economics, heaven/hell—on which all elements of the big city can find a place, Kishik composes his New York “fiction” philosophy and selects metaphors for the modernity of the second third of the 20th century, groping for a manifesto for the urban revolution in the “chaotic and fragmentary urban happening.”