Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Critical urban thinkers often imagine urbanisation and the Anthropocene as inevitably being companion processes. But is planetary urbanisation the necessary telos and spatial limit of life in the Anthropocene? Is urban resilience the final form of urban responses to climate change? Will (or should) the urban (as either spatial form or process) survive the upending impacts of climate change or adaptation? Or, if the Anthropocene is a time of deep environmental and epistemological upheaval without historical precedent, might even more recently created spatial concepts of the planetary urban condition themselves soon be out of date? This article raises these questions for urban scholars via critical engagement with a proposal to retire Miami – considered climate change ‘ground zero’ in the US and doomed by rising seas – and repurpose it as fill for ‘The Islands of South Florida’: a self-sufficient territory of artificial high-rises delinked from global infrastructural networks. This vision of an ‘urbicidal Anthropocene’, the article argues, suggests that the injunction subtending planetary urbanisation work – to relentlessly question inherited spatial frameworks – has not been taken far enough. Still needed is Anthropocene critical urban theory, to consider urban forms and processes emerging via climate change and adaptation, but also how such mutations may point beyond the theoretical and spatial bounds of the contemporary urban condition itself.