Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Extreme Cities
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: South African
Phone: 212-817-8355; ashleydawson.info
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| HEADING: | Dawson, Ashley |
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| 670 | __ |a His Extreme cities, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Ashley Dawson) data view |
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. City University of New York (CUNY), Graduate Center, NY, professor; College of Staten Island, NY, professor; Princeton University, Environmental Institute, Princeton, NJ, Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor, 2017-18. Editor of Social Text Online, 2010-14.
WRITINGS
Coeditor of essay collections, including Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities, Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Global Justice, Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus, and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism.
Contributor of articles to publications, including Atlantic Studies, Screen, Jouvert, South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Critique, African Studies Review, Interventions, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, Small Axe, Social Text, Postmodern Culture, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Ashley Dawson is a writer and educator. He has served as a professor at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. From 2017 to 2018, Dawson was the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. He has written articles that have appeared in publications, including Atlantic Studies, Screen, Jouvert, South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Critique, African Studies Review, Interventions, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, Small Axe, Social Text, Postmodern Culture, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
In 2017 Dawson released Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change. In an interview with Mark Karlin, contributor to the Truth Out website, Dawson explained: “Extreme cities are characterized, on the one hand, by dramatic forms of social and economic polarization. This inequality increases their vulnerability to the other form of extremity: the extreme forms of weather generated by climate change, whether these are heavy monsoon rains, storm surges driven by hurricanes or deadly heat waves, to name but a few.” Dawson continued: “Cities are warming at about twice the rate of the planet as a whole, and generate their own climates, as well as being responsible for over seventy percent of global carbon emissions. An economically polarized city is far more likely to leave sections of its population (and physical territory) vulnerable to climate change.” Dawson also told Karlin: “There is a great deal of interesting work being done to climate-proof cities. As I discuss at length in Extreme Cities, some of the most interesting efforts to do so are being undertaken by landscape architects and designers, who are experimenting with ways to make urban life more harmonious with the natural ecosystems upon which all cities rely.” In excerpts of an interview that appeared on the City University of New York Graduate Center website, Dawson stated: “Given the … perilous future we face, we’re going to have to reckon with retreat: retreating from certain parts of the country and the world that are really threatened. … We have to think about mass climate refugees and how we’ll cope—both within this country and internationally.”
Reviews of Extreme Cities were mostly favorable. A Publishers Weekly critic asserted: “Dawson makes a convincing case.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the volume as “a tough read that will mostly appeal to critics of neoliberalism, but also a substantive contribution to the growing dialogue about our response—or lack thereof—to climate change.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change.
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2017, review of Extreme Cities, p. 121.
ONLINE
Ashley Dawson Website, https://ashleydawson.info (May 28, 2018).
CUNY, Graduate Center Website, https://www.gc.cuny.edu/ (April 10, 2018), author interview.
Fast Company Online, https://www.fastcompany.com/ (October 16, 2017), Eillie Anzilotti, review of Extreme Cities.
Rain Taxi, http://www.raintaxi.com/ (May 28, 2018), Chris Barsanti, review of Extreme Cities.
Truth Out, http://www.truth-out.org/ (October 29, 2017), Mark Karlin, “Economic Inequalities and Climate Apartheid: Ashley Dawson on ‘Extreme Cities,'” author interview.
University of Pennsylvania, Wolf Humanities Website, https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/ (May 28, 2018), author profile.
Ashley Dawson is the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at the Princeton Environmental Institute for 2017/18 and Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of two recent books on topics relating to the environmental humanities: Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso Books, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R Press, 2016). Dawson recent completed work on a book entitled The Energy Commons: How to Fight Fossil Capitalism and Reclaim Public Power, and is currently writing about the experience and literature of planetary urbanization.
In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that the world’s cities are ground zero for climate change. They make the largest contribution of carbon to the atmosphere while being extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels. Most megacities are in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, they continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only increase carbon emissions, but will also place coastal residents at greater risk when water levels rise. Extreme Cities is a disturbing portrait of the future facing cities as varied as Jakarta, Delhi, Port-au-Prince, and São Paulo. Our best hope lies not with fortified sea walls, Dawson argues, but with urban movements already fighting to make our cities more just and equitable.
Welcome! This site archives my blog postings, articles, books, photos and other audio-visual material.
I am currently Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY.
My fields of specialization are cultural studies, environmental humanities, and postcolonial studies. Areas of interest of mine include the experience and literature of migration, including movement from colonial and postcolonial nations to the former imperial center (Britain in particular) and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South such as Lagos and Mumbai. I have also worked recently on contemporary discourses of U.S. imperialism and on the movement for climate justice.mongrel nation
I am the author of Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017); Extinction: A Radical History (O/R Books, 2016); The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (Routledge, 2013) and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
I have also co-edited four essay collections: Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket, 2015); Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (University of Michigan Press, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke University Press, 2007).
exceptionalMy work has been published in journals such as African Studies Review, Atlantic Studies, Cultural Critique, Interventions, Jouvert, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Screen, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Text, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
You can view a full list of my publications by downloading my CV. PDF copies of all of my published articles are also available on the Articles page of this site.
From 2010 – 2014, I was editor of Social Text Online. I remain a member of the Social Text editorial collective. I have curated a number of online forums for Social Text on topics such as academic publishing, social networking and the movement for democracy in Iran, and the Copenhagen climate summit; these forums are archived along with reviews, blog posts, and other materials at Social Text online.
If you have any questions or comments you can contact me at adawson{at}gc(dot)cuny(dot)edu.
Extinction_FBtimeline_851x315
QUOTED: "Dawson makes a convincing case."
The future city: two books present visions for the future of urbanism
Publishers Weekly.
264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p121. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Extreme Cities: The Perils and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change Ashley Dawson. Verso, $29.95 (384p) ISBN 978-1-78478-036-4
Dawson (Extinction: A Radical History), a professor of English at CUNY, takes aim at the empty rhetoric of "green cities" in this forcefully argued and eye-opening polemic. The book's locales are marked by "stark economic inequality"--the growing gap between those who can afford to insulate themselves from the consequences of climate change and those who cannot. Using New York City as his primary case study, Dawson argues that cities are both on the front lines of climate change and contribute disproportionately to it. Much-touted "fixes" to urban congestion and fragility, such as waterfront development and privately developed affordable-housing projects, serve only to reinforce social and economic inequalities while causing waves of what he dubs "environmental blowback." Moreover, rising sea levels will likely also necessitate a retreat from coastal cities. For Dawson, countering the threat of climate change must involve dismantling the system of global capitalism that has pushed civilization to the brink of "climate chaos." The book's synthesis of reportage, urban history, and climate science can result in the oversimplification of certain issues, but Dawson doesn't shy away from tough conclusions and makes clear that real climate justice must build "on anti-imperialist, antiracist, and feminist movements." Dawson makes a convincing case that, unless urban dwellers and civic leaders engage in a fundamental reconceptualization of the city and whom it serves, the future of urban
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
life is dim. (Oct.)
Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism Cassini Stiepard. Monacelli, $45 (296) ISBN 978-1-58093-485-5
Shepard, founding editor of the online publication Urban Omnibus, presents readers with a rich view of the challenges of and opportunities for sustainable "citymaking" in an era of increasing economic inequality and destabilizing climate change. Focusing specifically on New York City in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, Shepard profiles a wide variety of people, including housing advocates, gardeners, community activists, and young entrepreneurs, who are working behind the scenes to ensure a more equitable and sustainable future for the city and its residents. Through these examples, she argues that the making and remaking of a city is fundamentally a cooperative process that is most successful when a given resource or project is marshalled to serve the city's inhabitants in flexible, multivalent ways. For example, the group of scholars working for the Dredge Research Collective garnered interest in new technologies in sedimentary infrastructure through boat tours open to the public. Narrative footnotes, photographs, maps, and diagrams bring additional depth to the main text. The book offers a passionate and informed plea for citizens at the local level to recognize and invest in both daily and long-range projects that support the urban environment. Color photos. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The future city: two books present visions for the future of urbanism." Publishers Weekly, 28
Aug. 2017, p. 121. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A502652673/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c911990b. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652673
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QUOTED: "a tough read that will mostly appeal to critics of neoliberalism, but also a substantive contribution to the growing dialogue about our response--or lack thereof--to climate change."
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Dawson, Ashley: EXTREME CITIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Dawson, Ashley EXTREME CITIES Verso (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 10, 17 ISBN: 978-1-78478-036-4
A book that conveys much more of the peril than the promise of today's urban life in the age of climate change.After Donald Trump made the ill-advised decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, much has been made of the city as a bulwark against climate change, but Dawson (English/CUNY; Extinction: A Radical History, 2016, etc.) explains why today's cities may be too simple an antidote to our future problems. While experts often note that the per capita carbon emissions of city-dwellers are lower than in rural areas, the author points out that not only do cities supply a disproportionate contribution to the planet's overall carbon budget, but within cities like New York, just a few luxury high rises account for the bulk of that contribution. This leads inevitably to what Dawson calls "climate apartheid," a future in which "wealthy elites" profit from environmental crises while those already struggling face disaster. Using examples of imperiled cities around the world, but returning repeatedly to New York in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the author documents the failures of city planners, governments, urban recovery efforts, and even local first responders when faced with environmental challenges. While based in solid research, the conclusions Dawson draws are often so hypercritical and contentious that they might become unconvincing. The book is a call for a revolutionary shift, not just regarding the structure and function of cities, but also requiring a massive overhaul of economic, governmental, and social structures around the world. Dawson argues that our current capitalistic societies must be dismantled in order to make way for a more equitable future in which environmental conditions become increasingly unstable. A tough read that will mostly appeal to critics of neoliberalism, but also a substantive contribution to the growing dialogue about our response--or lack thereof--to climate change.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dawson, Ashley: EXTREME CITIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364829/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3dcdbf41. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364829
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QUOTED: "Extreme cities are characterized, on the one hand, by dramatic forms of social and economic polarization. This inequality increases their vulnerability to the other form of extremity: the extreme forms of weather generated by climate change, whether these are heavy monsoon rains, storm surges driven by hurricanes or deadly heat waves, to name but a few."
"Cities are warming at about twice the rate of the planet as a whole, and generate their own climates, as well as being responsible for over 70 percent of global carbon emissions. An economically polarized city is far more likely to leave sections of its population (and physical territory) vulnerable to climate change."
"There is a great deal of interesting work being done to climate-proof cities. As I discuss at length in Extreme Cities, some of the most interesting efforts to do so are being undertaken by landscape architects and designers, who are experimenting with ways to make urban life more harmonious with the natural ecosystems upon which all cities rely."
Economic Inequalities and Climate Apartheid: Ashley Dawson on "Extreme Cities"
Sunday, October 29, 2017 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
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Floodwaters surround office buildings on September 5, 2017 in Houston, Texas. (Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)Floodwaters surround office buildings on September 5, 2017, in Houston, Texas. The decrepancy of treatment between Houston and Puerto Rico, which was later hit by Hurricane Maria, is an example of "climate apartheid," according to author Ashley Dawson. (Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Today's big cities are ground zero for the impacts of climate disruption -- at risk from floods, cyclones and heat waves. In his new book, Ashley Dawson examines the dangers facing the world's megacities and the urban movements fighting to make city living not just safer, but more fair and equal. Order your copy of Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change by making a donation to Truthout today!
Climate change is past the point of being resolved by nature's resilience. Only radical social and economic change will halt global warming and "climate apartheid." A good place to start is in what Ashley Dawson's new book calls Extreme Cities, as the author tells Truthout in the following interview.
An economically polarized city is far more likely to leave sections of its population vulnerable to climate change.
Mark Karlin: What are the characteristics of an "extreme city"? Is anything serious being done globally to address our cities under extreme threat from climate change?
Ashley Dawson: Extreme cities are characterized, on the one hand, by dramatic forms of social and economic polarization. This inequality increases their vulnerability to the other form of extremity: the extreme forms of weather generated by climate change, whether these are heavy monsoon rains, storm surges driven by hurricanes or deadly heat waves, to name but a few. Cities are warming at about twice the rate of the planet as a whole, and generate their own climates, as well as being responsible for over 70 percent of global carbon emissions. An economically polarized city is far more likely to leave sections of its population (and physical territory) vulnerable to climate change.
There is a great deal of interesting work being done to climate-proof cities. As I discuss at length in Extreme Cities, some of the most interesting efforts to do so are being undertaken by landscape architects and designers, who are experimenting with ways to make urban life more harmonious with the natural ecosystems upon which all cities rely. Examples include the work of Kate Orff and the SCAPE studio to build protective natural barriers to prevent storm surge-related flooding of coastal communities using reefs made from oysters. This "oyster-tecture" would grow over time as sea levels rise, and the oysters along the reef would also purify significant amounts of coastal waters, providing a boon for other life forms, including fish, birds and humans.
These experiments at "living with water" offer an alternative to traditional engineering approaches, which hinge on building levees and other kinds of barriers to keep floodwaters at bay. All too often, the latter approach ends up worsening problems in the long run, as the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina showed. But although these new approaches are inspiring and important, they need to be complemented by efforts to fight environmental and social inequality and injustice. Otherwise the new "natural" barriers to climate catastrophe will benefit only the 1 percent.
Ashley Dawson (Photo: Verso Books)Ashley Dawson (Photo: Verso Books) Can you provide a couple of examples of what you term "climate apartheid" in the book?
The outrageous abandonment of Puerto Rico by the Trump administration for almost a week after Hurricane Maria devastated the island is a good example of "climate apartheid." While Texas and Florida immediately got promises of massive aid from the federal government after they were hit by hurricanes, Puerto Rico was not only given scant help, but is under the control of a Congress-appointed financial oversight board that has been systematically unraveling the island's critical infrastructures (including their public electricity utility) for the last year.
Resilience has become yet another justification for shrinking down the state and ignoring increasingly rampant inequalities.
So, the term "climate apartheid" alludes to the retreat of global elites (who are responsible for the lion's share of carbon emissions) into various forms of lifeboats, while the global poor are left to sink or swim. Another good example of climate apartheid is the xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria that has overwhelmed Europe as refugees from the political and environmental crisis in Syria have sought harbor in the relatively affluent countries of the European Union.
Again, European countries historically bear disproportionate responsibility for carbon emissions, given their early industrialization, but they are increasingly unwilling to abide by international agreements governing refugees. Such forms of exclusion are the most glaring ones, but we could also think about H-1B visas in the US and similar "guest worker" arrangements in European countries that seek to recruit desirable workers from Global South countries; this is a form of apartheid, since the system as it was originally instituted in South Africa was based not simply on keeping populations "apart," but also on ensuring a steady supply of workers for capitalist industries like the diamond and gold mines.
Today, as increasing numbers of countries around the world face climate disasters as well as slower forms of ecocide, the wealthy nations of the world are seeing increasingly potent racist movements that want to build high walls, both real and metaphorical.
The recent rash of hurricanes seemed to be connected to climate change only sparingly by the corporate mass media. It appears these massively destructive forces have done little to nudge policy along on climate change. Any thoughts?
Short answer: The revolution will not be televised.
Longer answer.... Although I don't own a TV, during the few times that I was in front of one during recent weeks, I repeatedly saw weathermen standing in heavy winds and torrential downpours talking about the storms bearing down on them. This seemed a rather ridiculous spectacle, but the corporate media did seem to be serving the public in such instances by telling people where the storms were going and what people needed to do protect themselves.
Radical demands can quickly come to seem acceptable if enough social movement energy gathers behind them.
While it would have been nice to have discussion of the way in which rising carbon emissions are driving ever-fiercer storms more often in the corporate media, I found that these issues were very strenuously underlined by alternative and social media in recent weeks. I think most people sense that there is a connection between the extreme weather of the last month and climate change, and are hungry to know the latest news from scientists in this regard -- at least those who are not totally captive to right-wing, climate-change-denying ideologues. US policy is not going to move while the federal government is controlled by these forces -- as it presently is -- but there's a massive resistance building to these reactionary trends, including in progressive states and cities like California and New York, and the movement for environmental and climate justice is an important part of this resistance.
What is wrong with the slogan of "resiliency" to deal with climate change?
Resilience is a term from the biological sciences that refers to the ability of complex ecosystems or life forms to withstand and even "bounce back" from various forms of stress. The idea emerged in the life science in the 1970s as a critique of models that presumed ecosystems were static (e.g. the idea of sustainability). In this domain, the idea is important and useful.
The problem, though, is that the notion has been hijacked by a bewildering variety of other discourses. Everyone now wants to be resilient, from anti-terrorist experts at the Department of Homeland Security to financial gurus on Wall Street to urban planners. The term has not only been emptied of much of its meaning, but has come to legitimize neoliberal ideas which shunt responsibility for withstanding the climate crisis onto the shoulders of individuals and communities, no matter how economically or socially marginalized they may be. So, resilience has become yet another justification for shrinking down the state and ignoring increasingly rampant inequalities.
You write that a transition away from capitalism that fosters climate change will require a "lockdown" of roughly $20 trillion in "fossil fuel infrastructure around the world." Is there any government willing to make a commitment to that, even one?
It depends how you put the question. Are any of the current crop of political leaders talking about throwing oil company executives into prison and seizing their assets? No.
We must stop this engine running pell-mell toward planetary ecocide.
But there are governments that are talking about total decarbonization of their economies. Half of Denmark's electricity will be produced from wind by 2020, and by 2030, coal will be phased out entirely. By 2035, all of Denmark's energy demands in electricity and heating will be met by renewable energy -- and, by 2050, Denmark has pledged that all of its energy will be clean, safe and renewable. Germany and Spain are not far behind Denmark in their decarbonization ambitions. Solar and wind power are growing very quickly, driven by economies of scale in places like China and India.
The transition is, however, not going fast enough, and will not happen of its own accord -- despite the hopes placed in the market by eco-modernists like Al Gore. This is why it is important to put radical demands like a total lockdown of fossil fuel infrastructure (along with plans for a just transition for workers in these industries) on the table now, even if there are no governments presently willing to endorse such demands. While these demands may seem quixotic now, they are what scientists are telling us we should demand if we are to avert planetary ecocide. Radical demands can quickly come to seem acceptable if enough social movement energy gathers behind them.
You state in Extreme Cities that, "We need to step off this treadmill of ceaseless growth if we are to survive as a species." What are the implications for consumer capitalism?
Truthout Progressive Pick
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change
"A ground-breaking investigation of the vulnerability of our cities in an age of climate chaos." -- Bill McKibben
Click here now to get the book!
The other day I bought some garlic at my local supermarket and noticed that it came from China.... As if it wasn't bad enough that most of the manufactured goods Americans buy are shipped here from half a world away because corporations want to take advantage of dirt-cheap labor and oppression of worker organizing in China, now even the simplest items of food are being shipped -- in massive refrigerated container ships, one imagines -- similar distances. But it gets even worse: Much of the meat now being consumed in China is being produced with soya produced in the Amazon, where the rainforest -- the lungs of the planet -- is being chopped down at a record clip.
Contemporary capitalism is a plague on the face of the Earth. And, in addition, it doesn't even work in its own terms: Economic inequalities are at record levels and the main engine of the capitalist system -- the US economy -- only keeps going through unsustainable injections of credit. Witness the fact that consumer debt is back at record levels in the US. We must stop this engine running pell-mell toward planetary ecocide. We have nothing to lose but our mind-forged manacles.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Mark Karlin
Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010. BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed "war on drugs" to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout's Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and innovative advocates on a weekly basis for 10 years. He authored many columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.
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As Cities Adapt To Climate Change, They Can Protect The Wealthy–Or The Rest Of Us
Our global economic system demands growth at all costs–but that imperative is causing the cities that support it to fall apart, author Ashley Dawson argues in his new book, “Extreme Cities.”
As Cities Adapt To Climate Change, They Can Protect The Wealthy–Or The Rest Of Us
“For most wealthy spectators the threat of sea level rise one day submerging their luxury condos doesn’t matter much.” [Photo: Ryan Parker]
By Eillie Anzilotti8 minute Read
The capitalist engine runs on immediate gratification. Returns are measured quarterly; impact is expected immediately. We see this in cities across the globe: Luxury high-rises spring up seemingly overnight, backed by developers deepening their pockets, and encouraged by governments anxious for tax revenue. Laser-focused on profits, the displacement and environmental disruption that often occurs around these developments are overshadowed. But this dynamic will, quite literally, sink us in the face of climate change and its related shocks. Ashley Dawson argues in his new book, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change.
The book delves into the coastal cities like New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam, where the effects of climate change will be most deeply felt. It’s not just the structural repercussions that Dawson is concerned with; as a professor of postcolonial studies at the City University of New York and a longstanding environmental justice activist, he’s well attuned to the ways that upheavals and disasters disproportionately affect the socioeconomically disadvantaged. As Donald Trump continues to roll back protection measures and disavow the U.S.’s role in global cooperation to mitigate the effects of climate change, the book is a clear-eyed reminder of who, and what, will be left most vulnerable as a result.
You can buy Extreme Cities here. [Photo: Verso Books]
In Extreme Cities, Dawson focuses on Miami, where foreign billionaire developers are withdrawing their money from developing countries and instead sinking it into high-rises and condominiums along the city’s fragile coastline. “For most wealthy spectators the threat of sea level rise one day submerging their luxury condos doesn’t matter much,” Dawson writes. “If they can pull their money out of a developing country, where the inflation rate is roughly 50% and park it in dollars in a Miami condo for five years, where it will appreciate 5%-10% a year, it’s not important what’s going to happen in 30 years.”
But, Dawson argues, it is for the rest of us. While the upper crust may not feel the effects of climate change until decades down the line, global warming and its attendant disasters, from land degradation to extreme weather events, are already rattling the socioeconomically disadvantaged across the globe. In Miami, low-income communities are continually socked with flooding from high tides as the city has failed to address the need to update its infrastructure to absorb excess water. The city is becoming unlivable for them already, as it will for everybody decades down the line. While the developers will continue to profit until the city sinks, those at the other end of the economic spectrum are already suffering.
Capitalism obscures these struggles. As long as money continues to flow upwards and into the hands of wealthy CEOs and developers, they will continue to build and expand in accordance with the capitalism’s growth imperative, which maintains that the whole economic system will collapse unless it continues to produce more and more and more.
Throughout the course of the book, Dawson–using examples from across both the global North and South–draws out the argument that the collapse of the economic system is bound up in the collapse of the cities that support it. “It is the capitalist world system, at bottom, that’s putting people in harm’s way by driving ceaseless economic expansion,” Dawson tells Fast Company. “But I wanted to think more specifically about how it plays out in particular cities.”
“While it’s important for cities to keep thinking about how to live more in harmony with water, ultimately… we’re going to have to talk about retreat.” [Photo: Wikipedia]
Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is the fastest-sinking city in the world. Parts of the nearly 10 million-strong city are subsiding at a rate of 10 inches per year. In an effort to stem the submersion, the government of Jakarta commissioned a consortium of Dutch companies to construct, over the course of 30 years, what will become the world’s longest seawall, extending for 25 miles and encompassing 17 artificial islands to be built in the bay created by the outer barrier and the city’s natural shore. The team behind the project claims the long wall will act as a viable defense against rising sea levels. Furthermore, developers promise that the $40 billion project, called the Great Garuda, will recuperate the cost through the sale of luxury homes and the accompanying office towers and shopping malls on the artificial islands. As much as the city is creating a plan to prevent disaster, it’s also creating new opportunities for real estate development.
In Extreme Cities, Dawson eviscerates the proposed development, pointing to the proven inefficacy of seawalls as a defense against extreme weather events (90% of the seawalls along the coast of Japan broke when the 2011 tsunami hit). The Great Garuda, he argues, fails to rectify Jakarta’s drain on its groundwater supply, which an architect working on the project has identified as the most basic cause of the city’s sinking. So why go ahead with the plan? “Coastal protection efforts such as the Great Garuda effectively constitute a new form of disaster capitalism, one in which highly remunerative real estate development overlaps with engineering megaprojects whose spectacular character is clearly designed to attract speculative capital investment,”
In other words, it mirrors what’s happening in Miami, where immediate investments take precedence over future stability. And in both instances—and so many more across the world’s megacities—the cities’ poorest people, and those who are least able to economically protect themselves against climate-change-wrought destruction, are the ones who fall victim to these schemes. In Miami, the relentless luxury development is driving up property values and the cost of living. In Jakarta, progress on the Great Garuda will dispossess residents of the informal settlements that have sprung up on the unstable land slated for redevelopment.
This dynamic is symptomatic of a whole host of concerning trends that have accompanied urbanization over the last several decades: lack of communication, lack of foresight, willful blindness to human need across the full socioeconomic spectrum. But the underlying driver of destructive development in cities, Dawson says, is privatization.
The private developers and architecture firms that are commissioned to undertake large-scale redevelopment projects like the Great Garuda are, to their credit, “trying to think about how cities could exist in a more complementary nature, and specifically with water,” Dawson says. In recent years, cutting-edge architects have shifted their focus away from building in silos and are designing their developments more holistically, integrating green spaces and other resiliency features in acknowledgment of the shifting demands of a world facing down climate change.
But the fact that they are private companies commissioned specifically to work on one project in one location within much broader and more complex urban ecosystems creates and strengthens structural and economic divides in cities. Illustrative of this, he says, is a redevelopment proposal, called Hunts Point Lifelines, that is currently underway in the South Bronx, New York. The design for the Hunts Point neighborhood was solicited through New York City’s post-Sandy reconstruction request for proposals, Rebuild By Design. Spearheaded by University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Olin Studio, a Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm, the plan comprehensively links the portion of the South Bronx to a proposed network of new waterfront parks that would line the river. New public transit hubs and a clean power generating station accompany the plan, as do new restaurants and public amenities attached to the parks.
The PennDesign/Olin team worked closely with community groups in Hunts Point to develop a plan that would address their chief concerns, mainly a lack of green spaces and poor air quality due to the numerous industrial hubs sited in the area. Hunts Point Lifelines does that, but Hunts Point is just one of several communities clustered on the South Bronx—it just happens to be the one where crucial citywide resources, like the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center and the Fulton Fish Market, are located. The neighboring Port Morris and Mott Haven and their combined 90,000 residents are left out of the redevelopment, as are the five other areas throughout the five boroughs that are designated as Significant Maritime Industrial Areas—low-income places where heavily polluting industries have been encouraged to cluster together in order to shield wealthier zip codes from health risks. Because these initiatives are not citywide, he says, they do little to advance equitable development, and the prioritization of Hunts Point over the rest of the South Bronx rings of the sense that “people in that region are constantly asked to make sacrifices for the rest of the city,” Dawson says.
The situation in the South Bronx, however, does gesture toward ways in which cities could better prepare themselves for the inevitable shifts brought about by the dual forces of climate change and urbanization. “A solution has to be for social movements to engage with city governments, and really push the city as a whole toward developing and carrying out a city-wide plan that’s based in social justice and doesn’t exclude communities,” Dawson says.
While the buzzword now among forward-thinking urban designers is resiliency–the idea that cities should be built to sustain and quickly bounce back from disasters instead of trying, but failing, to fully prevent them—Dawson argues that this idea too often reinforces existing structures (both in the literal sense and in the sense of power hierarchies within cities), when realistically, adaptation will necessitate letting some of those old structures and ways of thinking become obsolete.
A truly resilient city, Dawson suggests, is one that places equity and realistic necessity above short-term profit gains. And accomplishing that, he adds, might, in some cases, mean retreat. “While it’s important for cities to keep thinking about how to live more in harmony with water, ultimately a generation or two down the road, we’re going to have to talk about retreat,” Dawson says. The concept of retreat flies in the face of the capitalist growth imperative, and with the particularly American sensibility of expansion at all costs. But for communities like Miami and New Orleans, which will sometime in the near future be submerged, relocating will be necessary. “The question that arises is: How can we have a socially just retreat, rather than rich people just picking up and moving elsewhere?” Dawson says.
With entire cities slated to disappear everywhere from the U.S. to Indonesia, countries will have to figure out how to relocate their people. In the midst of the forthcoming upheaval, Dawson suggests, we might find a space to begin to build and live more sensitively, and with the foresight whose lack thereof landed us where we are today.
About the author
Eillie Anzilotti is an assistant editor for Fast Company's Ideas section, covering sustainability, social good, and alternative economies. Previously, she wrote for CityLab.
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QUOTED: "Given the ... perilous future we face, we’re going to have to reckon with retreat: retreating from certain parts of the country and the world that are really threatened. ... We have to think about mass climate refugees and how we’ll cope—both within this country and internationally."
Earth Day Reading: 'Extreme Cities' by Ashley Dawson
NewsAll NewsEarth Day Reading: 'Extreme Cities' by Ashley Dawson
Cover of "Extreme Cities" book by Graduate Center Professor Ashley DawsonExtreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, by Professor Ashley Dawson (GC/Staten Island, English), might lead you to take Earth Day more seriously this year.
As Dawson recently told CUNY’s Book Beat podcast, “We’re looking at potentially catastrophic levels of climate change and sea-level rise if we keep on the track we’re on right now.”
The facts, as presented by Dawson both in his book and his recent interview, are grim. Reports leading up to last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, showed that even if most major countries keep the promises they made under the Paris Agreement — a scenario that appears highly unlikely — the earth’s temperature will wind up 3 degrees centigrade hotter by 2100.
Warmer temperatures lead to rising sea levels, and to flooding in coastal cities. That, in turn, would leave “hundreds of millions of people displaced, and, in the United States, the bottom third of Florida underwater and the Mississippi Delta gone,” Dawson told Book Beat.
Dawson drew on his own experiences in New York when writing Extreme Cities. “I began teaching at CUNY in 2001, so I’ve seen a number of different disasters befall this city,” he said. “In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, once again I saw the city reeling when it was struck by a major disaster.”
Despite the devastation, people in New York came quickly to the help of their neighbors, he said. “It’s very important to think about grassroots responses to natural disasters of various kinds.” For the book, which was named one of the top books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly, he interviewed many volunteers with Occupy Sandy and similar relief efforts.
In the years since Sandy, New York has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and in “climate-proofing,” Dawson noted. And some countries, like the Netherlands, are pioneering methods of using natural infrastructure, such as wetlands, to protect cities and counter the effects of climate change — another promising sign, he said.
Yet these efforts seem small compared to the potential risks of a warmer earth. “Given the…perilous future we face, we’re going to have to reckon with retreat: retreating from certain parts of the country and the world that are really threatened,” Dawson said. “We have to think about mass climate refugees and how we’ll cope — both within this country and internationally — with large numbers of displaced people.”
To stop further climate change, “we need a just transition to a post‒fossil fuel society,” Dawson said an interview with the Princeton Environmental Initiative. He finds hope in New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent announcement that the city would divest its public pension funds from fossil fuel‒related investments and sue the five biggest fossil fuel companies. “The nation’s biggest and richest city is taking on the world’s biggest and most irresponsible industry. New York’s stirring challenge suggests that we may have arrived at a historic turning point in the struggle to avert global climate catastrophe.”
Submitted on: APR 10, 2018
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change
Ashley Dawson
Verso ($29.95)
by Chris Barsanti
To an SUV-driving climate change skeptic living in some sidewalk-less exurb, most solutions proffered by environmentalists for saving the planet must seem like a kick in the teeth. Those plans' underlying assumptions are usually that energy-guzzling cars and big suburban houses are selfish and wasteful. They also assume that the cramped quarters and public transit networks of the city—where, let's be honest, a good many people who believe in environmental action already live—are virtuously efficient, by comparison. Ashley Dawson, in his scorching jeremiad Extreme Cities, wouldn't disagree with the root of that equation, but he rails with jackhammer force against the self-congratulation delivered by one set of city-dwellers to all the rest. Don't get too comfortable, Dawson says here, because cities "are at the forefront of the coming climate chaos." After all, most great cities were built around ports, and sea levels are rising.
In Extreme Cities, Dawson sets out not just to prove how cities from New York to Jakarta are gravely threatened by climate change, but also to illuminate the ways that capitalism and class feed into and even exacerbate that threat. For Dawson, a Marxist-inclined professor of English at CUNY and author of Extinction: A Radical History, cities are hardly a solution to climate change. In his anti-capitalist critique, they are emblematic of the mentality that drove humanity to this current state of affairs. He describes modern cities as money "sinks" where "real-estate speculation provides a way for economies to grow as production." So, even though logic would dictate transforming low-lying shorelines into storm surge-absorbing wetlands, planners in cities like New York and Miami continue building right up to the water line. Meanwhile, even conservative modeling has seas rising over six feet by 2100. Set against that inexorable future, Dawson's description of a "feckless capitalist culture of ruinous growth" has the ring of truth.
Extreme Cities is an angry book—as it should be. Dawson spreads his contempt around, though not always evenly; he spends little time bothering with those who doubt the reality of climate change. Rather, he conserves most of his ammunition for the impressive-sounding but ultimately futile and even harmful plans to make cities more resistant to destructive flooding. For one, those plans usually focus on protecting high-net-worth areas like lower Manhattan and pushing floodwaters into lower-income areas deemed less worth of protection. For another, Dawson argues, resiliency strategies "inadvertently build up risk by creating a false sense of security and hope."
To buttress this rationale, Dawson analyzes several urban resiliency plans. He finds nearly all of them lacking in both foresight and economic justice. A typical blueprint hatched to protect New York is the so-called BIG U, which proposed a ten-mile-long series of landscaped berms around the financial and business core of lower Manhattan. Dawson's acerbic note is a lesson in common sense: "storm surges of the future will certainly not stop in their tracks at 42nd Street, where the berm will end." He contextualizes such plans amidst a future of truly catastrophic urban environmental challenges, which he says are "likely to unfold as a slow cascade of rising mortality rates punctuated by spectacular disasters." Set against that backdrop, high-end environmentally-focused urban planning will at "at best . . . produce gated green enclaves." He excoriates the inattention to protecting working-class urban people and neighborhoods, in examples ranging from the deprioritizing of areas like Red Hook, Brooklyn after Hurricane Sandy to the lack of resilient and sustainable building in low-income areas. (Cities aren't exactly asking for LEED certifications in public housing.) At worst, according to Dawson, high-minded and highly-paid urbanists are fiddling while Rome drowns.
Heavily informed by Marx, Mike Davis, and Naomi Klein, Dawson's view of the environmental threats facing modern cities is useful for its emphasis on the interlaced nature of economics and political power structures when discussing the allocation of resources in precarious times. But there are times when this normally tight and fiery book could have used some reining in. His analysis of the decentralized, ground-up manner in which Occupy Sandy provided effective post-storm relief in underserved parts of New York is on the nose, but repetitive after a point. Dawson gives lip service to looking at the issue globally but he only truly drills down when it comes to New York. (Dawson hopefully will be able to address the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in future editions; he doesn't include Houston as one of his "extreme cities," but Houston's toxic brew of unplanned sprawl, unprotected petrochemical and fossil-fuel facilities, and extreme racial and economic disparities—all mashed together in a flood-prone plain whose vulnerability to climate change—exacerbated super storms was heightened by the loss of wetlands to unchecked development-works as an excellent case study for all the problems Dawson highlights.)
Like many writers before him, Dawson also falls prey to the temptation of the ever-expanding holistic viewpoint. It's one thing to point out that capitalist impulses are trapping more and more capital in doomed coastal cities. It's quite another to lambast a hero like environmentalist Bill McKibben for comparing the climate change fight to World War II. Dawson pedantically carps about this analogy because the Allied powers "were both capitalist and imperialist." Certainly that's true. But it doesn't mean the Nazis didn't need defeating.
Where it matters, though, Dawson outlines the existential dilemma facing coastal cities, and the refusal of various powerbrokers to acknowledge that reality, in bold and frequently horrifying terms. One of the book's most vivid moments comes when he's talking with Hal Wanless, a geological science professor at the University of Miami, about the status of that slowly drowning city. "I get Wall Street people calling me all the time," Wanless says, "asking if they can get eight or nine years out of a condo on Miami Beach." How many other urban districts, one wonders, have already been written off, with their residents none the wiser?
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