Is the Urban Form Sustainable?

In a piece for Next City, Stephanie Wakefield outlines key points from her new book, Miami in the Anthropocene: Rising Seas and Urban Resilience, which calls for a rethinking of the role urban places play in building resilience and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

With the urban envisioned as the inevitable form of the twenty-first century, it seems the only question mark is whether urban spaces and processes will be more or less resilient or equitable, smart or inclusive.

Wakefield proposes an alternate paradigm for approaching the future of cities, noting that the urban form as we know it may not survive changing conditions. “Will and should the urban as we know it actually survive the upending impacts of climate change or human responses?”

Wakefield ponders, “Rather than an endless expanse of cities and urbanization processes with seemingly no terminus — the latter destined to be but fodder for ever greater resilience of the former — might the Anthropocene’s human and nonhuman dislocations produce other spaces, processes and imaginaries entirely?”