RUN_CRAWL_FIGHT: Urban Abandonment or Ramparts in the Face of Climate Change

Society suffers from a tendency towards maintaining the status quo, catering to the politically possible, and a seeming inability to invest in ideas and projects that will produce long-term sustainability. This leaves us with a design deficit in which climate consequences of the Anthropocene are projected and accepted by science yet debated and sometimes entirely ignored by politics and policy. Radical and creative strategies for sustainability and adaptation strategies at the scale of cities are left to futurists, visionaries, and inventors often dismissed as outliers or just plain crazy. How can we learn to make urban design choices that will bear fruit in the long term rather than merely serve immediate political and other valid but short term needs? Perhaps we can start by discussing the adaptability of our cities in stark but abstracted terms using similar yet unfamiliar challenges to allow for a focus on the creativity and design of adaptation instead of political and financial impossibilities. This ongoing research proposes categorization of municipal-level adaptation design for entire cities based on a variety of threats from rising sea level to social and political instability. Using the pole-shift mapping of Gordon-Michael Scallion and others as a provocation for discussion and stand-in for drastic climate change scenarios, a much-needed new approach to tackling the design and redesign of cities may be possible.

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9