Climate change and the limits of urban thought

Abstract

This essay argues that urban thought is increasingly out of step with the conditions it confronts. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and David Scott, I examine how and why redemptive forms of critique – those that cast critique as a means of rescuing or remaking the world – persist in important strands of urban studies, geographic and planning thought, even in the face of irreversible climate change. Through discussion of a recent pedagogical encounter where redemptive critical scripts failed to meet student concerns, I suggest the need to recalibrate urban thought around loss, limits and exhaustion. I then turn to recent work in negative, Caribbean and abyssal geographies as well as sociologies of loss to develop lines of inquiry and ethical orientations that are grounded in the climate-changed worlds we now and will inhabit. These are orientations that accept irreversibility and material loss, and that work with, rather than against, the emergent grammars through which climate-changed urban worlds are increasingly being sensed and understood. The work advocated for here does not represent a retreat into nihilism, but a commitment to revising the kinds of thinking and teaching we do such that they remain faithful to the conditions of the present. Without such recalibration, urban thought risks misreading the present – and failing to engage the questions posed by those most attuned to, and affected by, irreversible climate-linked losses.

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