Video: Urban Futures

Ashley Dawson's Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change is on sale for 50% off through Sunday, March 18 as part of our Politics of Climate Change reading list.

In November, The Center for the Humanities at CUNY hosted a discussion — cosponsored by Verso and the Art, Activism, and the Environment research group from the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research — hosted a discussion on the future of cities in the face of climate chaos, with contributions from Ashley Dawson, David Harvey, environmental justice activist Mychal Johnson, and architect Catherine Seavitt. 

Humanity is now a predominantly urban species, but the cities we inhabit are riven by deepening economic and social stratification. Megacities like New York, Miami, Mumbai and Jakarta are also on the frontlines of gathering climate chaos, vulnerable to extreme temperatures, rising tides, and increasingly violent storms. What are the underlying dynamics of the capitalist world system that are driving unsustainable urbanization? How are governments, civil society organizations, and social movements seeking to adapt to the increasingly perilous character of urban life? What prospects for radical transformation and social justice lie in the cities of the future? Join Ashley Dawson, author of Extreme Cities, urban theorist David Harvey, environmental justice activist Mychal Johnson, and architect Catherine Seavitt for a discussion of urban futures.

Watch a video of the conversation below. 

Extreme Cities

by Ashley Dawson

How will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that ci...

Rebel Cities

by David Harvey

Long before Occupy, cities were the subject of much utopian thinking. They are the centers of capital accumulation as well as of revolutionary politics, where deeper currents of social and politica...

Spaces of Global Capitalism

by David Harvey

Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results, from Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. The extreme volatility in contemporary economic fortunes se...

The Progress of This Storm

by Andreas Malm

An attack on the idea that nature and society are impossible to distinguish from each otherIn a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Ev...

Climate Leviathan

by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright

**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize**Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. Th...

Capitalism in the Web of Life

by Jason W. Moore

Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a ...

Disaster Capitalism

by Antony Loewenstein

Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav­els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to w...

Carbon Democracy

by Timothy Mitchell

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the Wes...

Green Gone Wrong

by Heather Rogers

Faced with climate change, many counsel “going green,” encouraging us to buy organic food or a “clean” car, for example. But can we rely on consumerism to provide a solution to the very problems it...

I'm With the Bears

Introduction by Bill McKibben

Contributions by Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, T.C. Boyle, Toby Litt, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson, Helen Simpson, Wu Ming and Wu Ming 1

Edited by Mark Martin

The size and severity of the global climate crisis is such that even the most committed environmentalists can drift into a state of denial. The award-winning writers collected here have made it the...

Violent Borders

by Reece Jones

Forty thousand people died trying to cross international borders in the past decade, with the high-profile deaths along the shores of Europe only accounting for half of the grisly total.Reece Jones...

The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Fernbach

The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped int...

Filed under: cities, climate-change, infrastructure, video