City That Never Sleeps®

In cities, particularly ones as on-the-go as New York, change is the norm. People move out, people move in. Buildings go up, buildings go down. Change defines cities (and no city more so than New York), makes them exciting, offers an escape from the sameness and the doldrums of the hinterland. And change allows for that fuzzy and self-indulgent emotion so common amongst veteran city-dwellers, nostalgia.

Yet it's without any nostalgia that AA Gill savages what he terms the "New New York" in this month's Vanity Fair (currently the home of some of the best writing in the US). The New New York is a vaccuous playground for New New Yorkers, "bankers, fund managers, moneyed elite," who now threaten to make the city seem "like every other grubbily transparent financial hub in the world."

Ever the acerbic outsider, Gill doesn't waste breath on whistful evocations of the past, but ventures directly into the heart of the matter; his is not simply an aesthetic critique, but a curiously sociological cynicism. He gazes at the apartment buildings of the New New York, "the imported bendy-glass-and-steel erections," and wonders

Who's going to live here? Who are the new, insecure, design-anemic rich? "Lifestyle is the way a person distinguishes himself or herself. It is the artistry of living. … Nationality and class have been replaced by lifestyle." Don't take my word for it. That's coming from Ian Schrager, the Buddha of disco, the Confucius of the dirty weekend. Consider that statement: heritage, achievement, geography, and history are all passé. Over. "This is what I did with my nightclubs and hotels and I intend to do with people's homes." Imagine that: coming home and finding a shrieking gay Cuban bouncer with a clipboard on the door; three peroxided trust-fund brats with added silicone bits, all talking at once, locked in the bathroom; and a family from Idaho in town to see The Producers.

As someone who considers himself a New Yorker (and a New Yorker already guilty of nostalgia in his youth ), there is a note within Gill's relentless vitriol that hits home. New York is special for the proximity of differences - between well-off and the less-so, between peoples, professions, accents, languages and so forth - that make collisions an organic part of daily life.

Yet this New York is disappearing. It is being increasingly eroded by a yawning financial disparities that separate most of Manhattan and western Brooklyn from the rest of the city. True, the wealthy parts of the city are emptying themselves of character and distinction in favour of "imported cachet," but they have also never been wealthier, and, similarly, the poorer parts of the city have never been poorer. The wealthiest fifth of New York City earn 52 times (up from 32 times in 1990) as much as the poorest fifth, comparable to income disparities in Namibia. While residents of East Midtown boast an average family income in excess of $800,000, sections of East Harlem earn less than $8,000. Both poverty and wealth are entrenched in New York, and the gulf is widening in both financial and social terms.

What's true for New York is to some extent also true for the world. Globalisation has surely generated wealth and jobs where they were once sorely lacking. Yet the oft-heard refrain that globalisation is also breeding unprecedented income inequality is difficult to ignore. One wonders how different nostalgia for the old New York is from nostalgia for the old Singapore, or old Bombay. Walls are rising in the supposedly flat world; New New York is probably not just an abomination, but a microcosm.