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.

A troubling encounter

On a late Friday afternoon in May of 2025, I met with a small group of undergraduate students for an informal reading seminar. We had decided to discuss a chapter of Stephanie Wakefield's insightful new book, Miami in the Anthropocene. The chapter examined recent state and local efforts to restore the Everglades, a vast wetland just outside Miami, Florida. Officials there hoped that reviving the Everglades’ freshwater flows would stave off saltwater intrusion into the city's only aquifer – one of the most damning, and difficult to combat, impacts of sea level rise for the city. The restoration project also signalled a revaluation of the Everglades. Where the wetland had long been derided and dredged for impeding development, it had recently come to be seen as essential in the city's struggle to survive climate change. After going over the basics of Wakefield's argument, I asked the students what they made of the wetland restoration efforts and the apparent revaluation of nature they entailed. An urban planning student viewed these developments largely positively. She noted that making nature ‘count’ in urban adaptation and resilience strategies could lead to more sustainable futures and marked an important shift in planning thought. A human geography student had a more critical view. She underscored that these efforts ignored a broader political problem: wetland restoration will prop up an unsustainable mode of urban development – fuelled largely by luxury real estate on an ever-vanishing coast – and ultimately contribute to the problem it is meant to address. The third student in the group, from environmental science, pushed back. He argued that even if government officials do all the right things from here on out – decarbonise, value nature, move away from real estate-oriented urban development – we are still stuck with a future where cities will look nothing like they do today. Massive amounts of carbon stored in the world's oceans, he noted, will slowly release into the atmosphere as temperatures rise, guaranteeing decades (if not centuries) of additional heating, sea level rise and acidification even if all emissions ceased tomorrow. For cities, he explained, this means that some level of ecological transformation is now inevitable. I looked to the other students to gauge their responses. They were, as I was, silent. His views – that no amount of political action can meaningfully alter the coming biophysical realities of climate change – had rendered all of us, at least for the moment, speechless.

That moment of speechlessness troubled me. I couldn’t initially pin down why I struggled to respond to this student's remarks. It wasn’t disbelief or discomfort with pessimism – that is an emotional terrain I know well, and one that I try to ward off in my teaching. Instead, it seemed to be indicative of a deeper problem: the tools that I had, and that I lacked, to think and speak about processes of irrecoverable urban loss. ¹ I could certainly speak to this student about the importance of staying attuned to the spaces, developments, and events where urban responses to climate change – whether adaptation, mitigation or resilience – could be contested and reworked. These are, after all, the kinds of dispositions I take to my own work on these subjects. But they weren’t appropriate in this instance. After all, this student was speaking precisely to the limits of urban climate responses – and to the limits of their politicisation among critics.

What I couldn’t speak to in that moment, and what this student ultimately probed, was the irreversible: the events and developments in and near cities that cannot be meaningfully redressed through various practices of politicisation; the urban worlds and relations that will simply be lost, no matter what, as climate regimes shift. The difficulties I had in this encounter were not incidental. Instead, they seemed to point to deeper tensions at the heart of urban thought – a term I use to refer to the critical commitments and orientations that have shaped important strands of urban studies, planning and geography and how they have theorised politics and futurity. While informed by a range of disciplinary influences, the field has by and large been built by thinkers who see the city as made and remade through political and social action – or as always in a state of becoming. If the city is a site of trenchant inequality and exclusion, it is also a site of struggle, emancipation, possibility and justice. The present may be bleak, but for many of these thinkers the future is still up for grabs – or, at the very least, open.

Climate change, however, exposes crucial limits of these understandings of the city, futurity, and the modes of critique that underlie them – important arguments advanced by Andreas Folkers (2021) and Bruno Latour (2018) in relation to social thought more broadly, and that have helped inspire my thinking here. This essay begins from these limits, which that moment of speechlessness revealed. It asks: how do we think and act as urban scholars when critical practices of politicisation fail to meet, or only partially meet, the moment? I use politicisation to refer to a wide set of practices through which urban scholars and practitioners seek to expose injustice, reveal contingency, contest dominant orders of things, and – crucially – to offer or imagine their remedy. While some traditions (e.g., Marxian urban thought, planning) ground these practices in normative commitments to justice and transformation, others (such as assemblage thinking) use them to underscore the ontological openness of the urban, emphasising potentiality and becoming without necessarily prescribing political ends. In both fields, the emancipatory promises of critique derive from the assumption that other worlds are possible. Strikingly, this is true even in traditions that attend to enduring environmental harms or irreversible socio-ecological degradation (e.g., urban political ecology). There, the narrative arc often remains oriented towards transformation or the belief that struggle can redirect or overcome loss. Importantly, these orientations also underwrite seemingly technical or ‘depoliticised’ domains of urban practice, where investments in resilience or sustainability are justified by their capacity to provide remedies to the problems that climate change poses for cities and those who live in them. My concern is that such orientations persist even as irreversible, climate-linked transformations accumulate, loss gains speed, and possible futures vanish.

For me, and regardless of their origins, these orientations are not just epistemological or ontological problems but increasingly ethical and pedagogical ones. Following the lead of my student, the core suggestion here is that urban thought must reckon with climate loss as an immutable urban condition (see also Elliott, 2018). Doing so challenges urban thinkers to reconsider what cities are, what politics can do, and how we think, teach, and act when some futures are already and irrevocably foreclosed. Put differently, climate change compels an urban thought attuned not only to struggle and possibility, but to the kinds of losses that no amount of struggle or insistence on potentiality can overcome or transcend. At a broader level, climate change requires a recalibration of urban thought that is rooted in an ethics of fidelity: a commitment to revising the kinds of thinking and teaching we do such that they remain faithful to the conditions of the present (Scott, 2004). Without such a recalibration, urban scholarship risks clinging to critical scripts that may no longer resonate in and beyond the classroom, and that obscure rather than illuminate the irreversible transformations already underway.

This essay is an effort to enact that ethic and the recalibration it entails. What follows develops these claims by outlining core intellectual foundations of urban studies and planning thought, and how they have conceptualised politics and politicisation in relation to urban change and futures. Across diverse traditions, two shared orientations often emerge. First, that the future remains open, whether as an object of shaping or as an (assumed) ontological condition. Second, that political interventions, and the modes of critique underwriting them, can generate more just, inclusive, or otherwise urban worlds and epistemologies. As I show through a select review of prominent climate resilience and adaptation literature, these orientations persist into the present. With some notable exceptions, familiar questions – who is included or excluded from urban climate initiatives, who benefits or bears risk, whose voices are heard, whether and how climate issues are rendered technical by powerful actors – continue to guide critical urban inquiry on climate change. These questions remain urgent in light of deepening inequalities and cascading disasters. Yet in their reliance on politicisation – as a key means of rendering contemporary events and developments contingent and/or open to contestation, and therefore as an essential ingredient in the making of alternative futures – such approaches often struggle to account for processes, events and developments that exceed political remedy, and thus to the futures that are already out of reach.

To better apprehend the enduring political temporalities of urban thought – and their limits under present conditions – I turn to Hannah Arendt's (2019) account of politics, irreversibility and ‘action into nature’. While often read as a theorist of political speech and freedom, Arendt offers a powerful critique of modern desires to conflate politics with making: ² that is, to treat political action as a matter of designing preferable outcomes – treatment grounded in the assumption that the future remains open and available to (re)construction. ³ But it is precisely this assumption of openness that becomes most strained under conditions of climatic regime shifts and their attendant, irreversible losses. Arendt’s critique is therefore particularly relevant today, as cities grapple with ongoing and anticipated climate-linked transformations that elude remedy and that are the result of prior actions beyond our control. That critique is also ethically vital as our students – born into more and more climate-changed worlds with the passing of every year – are increasingly asking questions, making claims, and developing orientations that both exceed and challenge the redemptive grammar of prominent urban thought. If Arendt helps explain the origins of dominant conceptions of politics within urban thought as well as their limits under climate change, David Scott (2004: 12) helps us interpret their stakes: as tragic, where “new forms of thought are struggling with old.” In the final section, I identify ways to address, and move beyond, these limits in urban research and teaching. Here, I draw on my own pedagogical decisions in a moment of speechlessness as well as growing sociologies and geographies of loss and limits (see, e.g., Bonilla, 2020; Chandler and Pugh, 2023; Elliott, 2018; Rhiney, 2020; Rose et al., 2021; Wakefield, 2025) – whose underwriting orientations and commitments my students have referred to as refreshingly, urgently honest.

To call this impasse tragic and to turn towards questions of irreversible material loss and limits is not to suggest that urban researchers abandon politicisation or replace it with politically enervated melancholia. Instead, the point is to ask new questions. Put simply, if many strands of critical urban thought emerged in response to the specific dilemmas and promises of modernity, we now confront a problem-space defined by irreversible climate breakdown and regime shifts, as well as their manifold, uneven impacts within and across cities and those who live in them (Foucault et al., 2008; Rabinow, 2009; Scott, 2004). The task for urban thought, then, is one of recalibration: recognising the limits of politicisation in grappling with the present and adjusting our conceptual and analytical vocabularies accordingly. This paper offers one such attempt.

Locating politics within urban thought

Despite their differences, many strands of urban thought share a common orientation: that the city is open to – if not outright demands – political remedy, grounded in the belief that urban conditions can be (made) otherwise. Whether articulated through Marxian accounts of accumulation and spatial injustice (Harvey, 2010; Lefebvre, 1996), feminist and postcolonial critiques of everyday urban life (Jacobs, 2012; Roy, 2009), or Southern urbanism's attention to improvisation, informality and the generative potential of the ordinary city (Parnell and Pieterse, 2016; Robinson, 2002), urban thinkers tend to cast the urban as a site of possibility – where, for example, unjust arrangements can be contested and transformed towards seemingly more desirable ends. Planning and design literatures share similar commitments. Participation and inclusion are treated not only as normative goods but also as techniques through which more just, resilient, or democratic cities might be brought into being (Healey, 1997). For instance, Innes and Booher's (2004) communicative planning theory foregrounds inclusion and consensus-building as means of producing more just urban outcomes – an orientation that treats political process as a kind of design tool. Similarly, Fainstein's (2009) argument for the ‘just city’ advances specific criteria – equity, democracy, diversity – as ideals to which cities ought to be planned. What cuts across these traditions is therefore neither a shared method nor object but a shared confidence: that political action – whether through critique, contestation or planning itself – can produce not only more ‘preferable’ or alternative urban futures, but more just urban epistemologies. Even when acknowledging deep structural obstacles – entrenched inequality, systemic racism or authoritarian drift, among other examples – urban scholarship often returns to the conviction that the city, and our knowledge of it, can still be made differently.

These broader commitments to openness and world-making are evident even in more recent frameworks that challenge traditional accounts of urban form, politics, and agency. Urban political ecology (UPE), for example, has been central to rethinking cities as socio-natural configurations shaped by uneven metabolic flows and infrastructural ecologies (Heynen et al., 2006). But these configurations are not analysed for their own sake. Instead, they are analysed in order to expose and contest the power relations that shape them – and, by implication, make new configurations in the future. As Heynen et al. (2006: 12) write, UPE asks ‘who produces what kind of socio-ecological configurations for whom’ precisely to animate political projects of ‘radical (urban) democracy’. Assemblage thinking, by contrast, unsettles hierarchical, state-centred and anthropocentric models of the urban and urban change by highlighting the emergent character of sociotechnical urban systems (Farías and Bender, 2012). Whereas certain strands of UPE ground politicisation in unveiling relations of domination and inequality to effect progressive change, assemblage approaches locate the political in identifying the restless potentiality of cities and the contingency of their forms, thereby rendering the urban open to multiple becomings. Despite their important differences, the mechanisms of politicisation in these fields – revealing power structures and inequality or contingency and possibility – are yoked to conceptions of the future as open, of other urban worlds as at least cognitively or imaginatively available. As McFarlane (2011: 214) puts it with respect to assemblage thinking, assemblage ‘[attunes] us to how urbanism might be produced otherwise…[and] how an alternative world might be assembled’.

Strikingly, these understandings of politics and orientations to the future remain deeply influential even in contexts where the effects of excess carbon emissions are robbing entire species and geographies of a future – or at least a future recognisably continuous with the present. In planning debates on climate adaptation, for example, Vale (2014: 191) offers one of the clearest and earliest critical interventions. Focusing on the rollout of urban resilience planning initiatives globally, he asks whether the term is fit for purpose in cities, where pre-existing inequalities shape uneven distributions of vulnerability and therefore uneven resilience. Crucially, however, the term still ‘retains promise’: if explicitly tethered to initiatives that address these disparities, resilience has the potential to support progressive planning practice. As introduced above, Vale's critique is grounded in longstanding, plannerly reformist commitments and understandings of politics as corrective and even redemptive: by adjusting core aspects of contemporary planning norms, more equitable urban worlds are possible – a belief that endures even as the material grounds for such betterment literally erode beneath us.

Vale's provocations have proven to be a particularly productive line of inquiry for planning research. They have inspired or helped support further critiques of resilience that – while contentious themselves (see, e.g., Grove, 2018) – have compelled planners to call for more equitable or transformative approaches to climate adaptation in cities and even the abandonment of resilience as an object and norm of urban government writ large (Fainstein, 2018; Lamb and Vale 2024; Meerow and Newell, 2019; Shokry et al., 2020). Of course, scholarly interest in probing the relationships between politics and urban climate governance extends beyond the field of urban planning. Those relationships have also been objects of sustained scrutiny within urban geography and urban political ecology (see, e.g., Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013; Hodson and Marvin, 2009; Long and Rice, 2019; Ranganathan and Bratman, 2021). Swyngedouw (2009, 2011) offers some of the most widely cited analyses of these themes to-date, arguing that resilience and adaptation planning often operate through technocratic consensus and managerial rationalities. In doing so, he asserts that these plans displace the possibility for agonistic conflict, reinforce neoliberal urban orders, and ultimately – and perhaps fatally – depoliticise urban climate governance. As a consequence, he calls for the reactivation of urban politics – not as a procedural correction à la Vale's reformist critique, but as a radical return to dissensus, confrontation, and political struggle. Despite these distinctions in approach, both Vale and Swyngedouw’s arguments remain anchored in the belief that political reform or intensified struggle can deliver more just urban futures as the climate changes. More politics, it seems, better outcomes.

The persistence of politicisation amid planetary breakdown

That these orientations persist in the present is no mystery. They are sustained by the multiple, intersecting worlds in which urban thinkers live, teach, work and believe. For one, many scholars have argued that we live in an era marked by ‘polycrisis’: a convergence of multiple, interconnected and mutually reinforcing economic, environmental, and political crises (see Tooze, 2022). One need not spend more than five minutes scrolling through BlueSky or X (formerly Twitter) – where news of the latest climate change-induced disaster, authoritarian resurgence, and soaring inequality endlessly populates the screen – to find this diagnosis persuasive. In moments like these, the impulse to politicise contemporary problems – again, to identify or imagine remedy, as well as the possibility that things can become otherwise through concerted interventions or pure contingency – is not just an intellectual disposition. It becomes an ethical imperative. These attachments to politicisation are, I think, also sustained by the time we spend in the classroom and our commitments to students. As the opening vignette suggests, pessimism is not an orientation to the future I seek to cultivate in my teaching – the prospect of doing so has quite literally rendered me speechless. Politicisation in this sense can often act as a kind of conduit for what bell hooks (2013) and others call ‘critical hope’: a commitment to the possibility of transformation even as we acknowledge the fragility of the present and the occasional foreclosure of futures. Put differently, politicisation is not just a critical tool; it is a way of staying with students at a time marked by profound uncertainty, anxiety and rupture. Politicisation offers a calming, affective clarity that is essential for effective pedagogy in troubling times.

Just as significantly, remedy – the expectation that we make new, ‘improved’, or alternative worlds through the actions we take today – is demanded by the institutions in which we work and the funding bodies on which our research depends. For better or worse, in recent decades, it has become increasingly difficult for researchers to secure essential research funds without promising to deliver some form of broader public ‘impact’ – whether through policy briefs, stakeholder engagement or demonstrable contributions to practice. These expectations are particularly pronounced for researchers doing work with multilateral development institutions in the Global South, where terms like ‘scalable solutions’ are the lingua franca of daily business (Li, 2007). Intentionally or not, these broader institutional conditions and discourses reinforce – and at times explicitly demand – understandings of the city as a site of solvable problems, even and especially in the face of climate change (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020). In this sense, even institutions often criticised for rendering political problems technical operate within logics analogous to certain strands of critical urban thought: by identifying problems and acting on them, cities can be made better. Perhaps most powerfully, however, our attachments to politicisation endure because of our broader intellectual, political, and ethical commitments to the fundamental openness of cities – and our reflexive fealty to the modes of critique that have long sustained them (Folkers, 2021; Latour, 2004; Scott, 2004). In times of planetary breakdown, the belief that the future can be different or even better than the present – because it has been made different before – continues to serve as a vital lodestar for urban thought and practice.

Action into nature: Climate change and the trouble with (urban) politics and futures as ‘making’

The scholarly contributions, political and ethical commitments, and broader affective orientations of these thinkers are of tremendous importance and have greatly animated my own research and teaching. But as my reading group encounter laid bare, there is something about climate change that has recently and quite literally given me pause. That moment of speechlessness was certainly about a pedagogical aversion to catastrophism. But it was also about a growing ethical discomfort I have with repeating critical scripts whose operating premises – perhaps even operating promises – feel increasingly ‘out of joint’ with the world in which we live (Scott, 2004; see also Bonilla, 2020). The tacit, crucial promise of urban thought – that urban futures can be made better or at least become ‘otherwise’ through various political actions taken in the present or the sheer potentiality of the city – rests on an emancipatory narrative form, which implies and indeed depends on an open future. As important as these narratives and conceptions of the future are, they can often falter in an era when climate change is not only foreclosing many futures, but also burning the very ground on which redemptive political claims can be made and acted on to a crisp.

Of course, politicisation remains one of the most important tools we have for naming harm, assigning responsibility, refusing resignation and effecting change. But as several scholars have observed, it is not always enough (see, e.g., Lewis, 2022; Roy, 2019; Thomas and Rhiney, 2024; Yusoff, 2018). Indeed, the imperative to politicise risks overstating what critique can do, especially when the stakes are irreversible loss. Put differently, the issue is not that we turn to politicisation, but that we sometimes overburden it. Specifically, we tend to imbue it with a capacity to make. As Arendt warned long ago, the conflation of politics with making – of action with design – anchors our thinking to futures imagined as open and available to construction. In doing so, it also risks obscuring the unpredictability, uncontrollability, and irreversibility of what has already been set in motion – a point also made by David Scott (2004) in his account of postcolonial thought in the Caribbean, and that I suggest is a generative frame for reorienting urban thought under climate change.

The ‘frustration of action’ and the desire for order: From praxis to poiesis

In The Human Condition, Arendt (2019) sets out to clarify three fundamental human activities that she believes have become too blurred, too taken for granted over time: work, labour and action. Of these, the distinctions she makes between action (praxis) and work (poiesis) are the most relevant for our purposes. Action, Arendt notes, was for a time the highest form of politics and political life in Ancient Greece: think citizens gathering together in the agora to debate and deliberate on matters of shared concern. These individuals are not there for the sake of building anything. As Arendt observes, the Greeks did not have a term for ‘to will’, suggesting an absence of the future-oriented, affirmative, and instrumental frameworks that dominate and exemplify much of the political thinking we see today. Instead, political action occurred in the simple event of appearing together and acting in concert. It is in this instance of ‘being together,’ rather than through the forging of any kind of plan or shared ideal, that new processes begin – for better and for worse.

For Arendt, then, there are three core features of action: first, it happens only with others, through ‘constant contact with the web of acts and words of other men’ (p. 184). Action is therefore ‘authorless’ and plural – its effects emerge from a shared field of responses. Second, and relatedly, action is unpredictable: because actions occur among people, and are thus already entangled in human affairs, actions inevitably prompt further actions and reactions that elude individual foresight and control. Actions are therefore, and third, boundless and irreversible. As Arendt (p. 190) writes, ‘actions and reactions among men never move in a closed circle and can never reliably be confined to two partners’. Once begun, they cannot be undone. One of the crucial implications for Arendt here is that politics (praxis) is not about making or ‘work’ (poiesis). Indeed, politics cannot be about work as it eludes all of what the builder would need to produce their object: stability, control and the isolation of materials from their surroundings.

The elusiveness of action is precisely what made political philosophers – from Plato to Marx – seek to escape what Arendt calls ‘the threefold frustration of action: the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors’ as well as the ‘haphazardness and moral irresponsibility’ that action entailed (p. 220). One key way political philosophers did so was by substituting politics (as praxis) for work or making (poiesis): a process of world-making. This shift did not alter the unpredictable and plural nature of politics. What it changed was how politics was imagined: as making. As Arendt writes, politics, when thought of as making, ‘entails the creation of ideals and efforts to convert reality into that ideal’ (p. 222). Politics, in other words, becomes instrumentalised – a ‘means to obtain an allegedly higher end’ (2019: 230). As a consequence, the proliferation of poietic reasoning also brought about a distinct relationship with, and conception of, the future: not only open but shapeable. This is what makes it so enduringly attractive across political traditions – even those that reject instrumental, teleological conceptions of politics. Indeed, even some strands of contemporary urban thought that otherwise prize contingency and emergence retain a tacit belief in the remakability of the world, albeit one that climate change increasingly calls into question.

Making urban futures

It is easy to observe the presence of politics-as-making in contemporary urban thought. And if there were a field in which it is most intuitive for this conception of politics to dominate, it would be urban studies. After all, it explicitly focuses on the built environment and the lives, livelihoods and relations bound up in it. Buildings go up – and sometimes come down – as a result of political pressure. Access to basic rights, goods and services in the city is forged through the sustained actions of well-organised social movements. Plans, when including the right groups, can advance equity-oriented reform. In other words, and to paraphrase Harvey (2010), cities change because of the changes we make ourselves: the urban is a politics of making, unmaking and remaking. To think of politics and the urban futures it forces into the present or pushes into the past as something other than making is, in many ways, to ignore what we see and do daily.

Of course, the dominance of poietic readings of politics in urban studies, as well as the city more broadly, stems deeper than empirical observation; it is foundational to the field. From its earliest Marxian formulations to contemporary turns in critical geography and Southern urbanism, urban theory has been centrally concerned with diagnosing injustice and prescribing interventions to produce more just, inclusive or sustainable urban futures. Lefebvre’s (1996) call for the right to the city, for example, rests on the belief that urban space should be remade to meet collective needs. David Harvey (2010) similarly urges that cities are sites of class struggle that must be transformed through political-economic intervention if just, sustainable urban futures are to be had. These are not just critiques; they are blueprints for remaking urban life, seemingly anywhere and at any time.

Nowhere is this poietic impulse more explicit than in planning – so much so that to name it risks tautology. Planning, after all, is about planning: the design and realisation of preferred futures, or as Baum (1997) puts it, ‘the organisation of hope’. Indeed, the discipline as we recognise it today emerged in response to the worst excesses of the 19th-century capitalist industrialisation – pollution, overcrowding, premature death – that threatened the viability of the capitalist project itself. To have a better future, let alone any future, some state interventions – investments in public health, sanitation and parks, among others – were necessary. Of course, hope is only one among many affective orientations that planning has mobilised – arguably not even the dominant one, given its entanglements with white supremacist, patriarchal, authoritarian and colonial projects worldwide. Nevertheless, the point is that in the field of planning, politics was from the start instrumental. It pertained to taking a given state of affairs and rendering it an ideal one. Somewhat ironically, this is true even as planners critique instrumental modes of reasoning in urban governance and exclusion in favour of enhanced participatory mechanisms: one includes substantive participation because it will, among other things, yield better or more just outcomes. It is also a politics, to borrow once more from Folkers (2021), predicated and dependent on an open, malleable horizon: that there are, in principle, any number of ways a city can be made and remade or become something else – ideally something better – over and over again.

Sinking ‘islands of certainty’: Poietic politics and temporalities in an era of climate change

The transformation of action into making, Arendt observed, has been wildly successful – so much so that ‘it is almost impossible to discuss these matters [political theory and politics more generally] without using the category of means and ends and thinking in terms of instrumentality’ (p. 229). To grasp the stakes of this transformation, it is worth returning to Arendt's own examples. Poiesis, Arendt reminds us, is the act of making something – like a chair or a bed – according to a pre-existing model or blueprint. Follow the right steps, and you get the object you intend. What is made, however, is more than just functional. It becomes an artifice, ‘a thing of the world’ that helps stabilise human life (p. 137). Artifices stabilise because they last. As Arendt explains, we always have some image of a bed or chair before we build one. That image – and the object itself – remain relatively stable across time and context. Their durability allows us to maintain a sense of continuity, our ‘ever-changing nature notwithstanding’ (p. 137). In this way, artifices anchor us in time and space, offering what Arendt calls ‘islands of certainty’ in a sea of flux (p. 244). Crucially, artifices also promise remedy – and thus come to bear on how we think about, and attempt to act on, the future. If a chair breaks, we know how to fix it. Failing that, we can rebuild it from the same model. Damage is not existential; repair is procedural. This, for Arendt, is what makes poiesis so alluring to political thinkers: its blueprints suggest not only a way forward, but a way back to known, stable and preferable forms.

We can see the power and importance of poietic thought in urban thought and practice. It has, after all, enabled urban planners and policymakers to develop and deploy vital tools and rationales for transformative change, whether related to public health, green space or equitable regeneration. With respect to epistemology, desires to deepen and diversify urban thought have exploded our knowledge of how cities are governed, experienced and (re)made globally. Finally, our time-tested critical orientations – attunement to exclusion or contingency, the rendering technical, the politics of knowledge, and so on – equip us to respond to crisis and change in the city, again and again, in pursuit of a better or at least alternative urban condition. And yet, the very qualities that make poiesis so compelling – its portability and stability, its promises of recovery and open, malleable futures – render it ill-suited for, or at least only partially helpful for navigating, a world shaped by irreversible material loss. In this case, a world shaped by climate change.

Arendt, of course, was writing at a moment when nuclear war – and the still-recent memory of the Holocaust – posed the gravest threats to human life and meaning. But the dangers she identified in that moment remain no less urgent today: above all, the tendency to conflate politics with making – anchoring politics and political action to the promise of recoverable, improvable and fundamentally open futures – even as what unfolds is irreversible and often beyond remedy. Nowhere is this danger clearer, or more consequential, than in actions into nature. These are political interventions, like the detonation of atomic bombs, that breach not only the social world but the natural one. In doing so, actions into nature set in motion what Arendt called ‘irreversible, irremediable “processes of no return”’, defying not just poietic logics but negating the world in which they act (2019: 232). Anthropogenic climate change – as an irreversible outcome of prior political actions and as a process that radically and irrevocably alters soils, seas and cities – certainly fits such a designation. What is at stake for me is that urban thought, as a kind of artifice, will continue to prioritise mainly poietic interpretations of climate change even as it destroys the very ground on which poietic reasoning depends. Put differently, I worry that the ‘islands of certainty’ that urban thought has developed over the decades are slowly sinking into rising seas, and we either cannot, or refuse to, see or articulate it.

These failures of recognition and articulation – or rather, these persistent attachments to poietic readings of the city – pose a number of problems. For one, they can produce analyses that miss their object and, in doing so, can act as a kind of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011). Returning to the Swyngedouw (2009, 2011) examples, analyses that expose the neoliberal underpinnings of climate governance – calling, for instance, for a return to agonism or radical struggle – frequently imply that the problem, or at least the main problem, is not climate change or irreversibility but the wrong kind or absence of ‘proper’ politics. As such, even critiques of technocratic planning can end up reproducing the instrumental logic they seek to dismantle: if we just politicise harder, struggle more radically, build more ‘community’ – the list goes on – we can recover what is being lost or enact better or alternative futures. And in some cases, that is certainly true. But in others, as Arendt well knew, and as my student so clearly understands, it is not. Some futures are simply and already beyond reach, and it can be both harmful and irresponsible to assume or suggest otherwise.

That moment of speechlessness with my students was not, I came to realise, about a fear of pessimism. It was about growing conceptual exhaustion. The tools that I had presumed an open future – one that could be meaningfully shaped, often in ‘better’ or at least ‘alternative’ directions. As important as they are, these tools barely scratched at the edges of the ‘processes of no return’ that Arendt identified in the mid-20th century and that my student so clearly, immediately and succinctly articulated nearly 70 years later. These tools did not meet the moment, at least not on their own. That encounter pointed to something important: that in many ways, urban studies is in a moment of profound disjuncture between the conditions of the present and its existing modes of thought. This is what David Scott (2004) calls tragedy.

Urban thought in tragic times: New problems, new questions

It is this disjuncture – between the kinds of questions we know how to ask, the kinds of answers we know how to give, and the conditions we now face – that Scott (2004) helps us name. In Conscripts of Modernity, Scott of course was not writing about climate change and its stakes for urban thought. Instead, he was writing about the postcolonial present – specifically in the Caribbean – and its significance for postcolonial thought more broadly.

Decades after anticolonial movements reshaped the region and inspired liberation struggles across the globe, Scott observes that many of their utopian promises of emancipation had not only failed to materialise, but had curdled into political disillusionment, persistent economic precarity, and what he calls a ‘morass of corruption and authoritarianism’ – conditions which could not simply be undone or reversed. And yet, radical postcolonial thought continued to cling to the language and temporalities of anticolonial struggle: narratives of ‘longing and vindication that link past, present, and future in a steady rhythm of progressive (sometimes righteously exultant) redemption’ (Scott, 2014: 799).

It was this reflexive attachment to an earlier political temporality – an insistence that the questions and horizons of the anticolonial past ‘[continued] to be ours’ despite all evidence to the contrary – that had rendered this particular present tragic ⁴ (Scott, 2004: 22). That is, the inherited tools and grammars of postcolonial critique no longer illuminated the world they were meant to make sense of, let alone transform. Crucially, for Scott, this temporal ‘out-of-joint-ness’ is not simply a theoretical mismatch. It is also an ethical and epistemological failure, as it leaves critical thinkers unprepared to confront the world in its present conditions. To remain tethered to ‘enfeebled’ frameworks, he warns, is to become conscripts of a modernity whose liberatory promises have collapsed. It is to be bound to old futures, old questions, and old answers that are rapidly becoming our past and that have little to say about our present. Yet Scott does not call for a rejection of critique. Instead, he calls for its recalibration: a reorientation towards the problem-space of the present – that is, ‘the ensemble of questions and answers through which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs’ (2004: 4). After all, what made anticolonial thinkers like C.L.R. James so powerful, Scott (p. 22) argues, was precisely this ‘fidelity to the present’ – not to inherited hopes or past scripts, but to the particular stakes and impasses of their own moment.

What Scott names as tragedy in the postcolonial context is now, I think, unfolding in urban thought: a critical repertoire increasingly out of step with the climate-changing world it confronts. The problem is not necessarily that earlier urban scholars were ‘wrong’ to take poietic orientations – politics as an act of world-making – towards futures and urban change (though Arendt might disagree). Following Scott, their readings were historical. The questions that canonical urban thinkers have asked, and the answers they have developed – particularly around politicisation and its open horizons – emerged in response to the problems and conditions of their time: industrialisation, racial capitalism, post-war reconstruction, colonial domination and anticolonial struggle, just to name a few, and the staggering inequalities that shaped urban life across varying axes of difference.

Nor is irreversible loss – or the intellectual labour to make sense of it – a new phenomenon. It has, for example, long structured life and thought in (settler) colonial geographies, where histories of extraction and environmental degradation have rendered loss foundational rather than exceptional (Bonilla, 2020; Moulton and Machado, 2019; Rhiney, 2020; Sheller, 2020). Put differently, these attunements do not need to be invented; they already exist. That they remain relatively marginal in prominent urban thought – in general and especially in relation to climate change – may indeed reflect what Roy (2019) identifies as the field's persistent if inadvertent investment in whiteness and its open, progressive futurities (Grove et al., 2022). ⁵ Yet climate change both compounds and exceeds those histories of loss. If these traditions have theorised loss as both an event and an enduring social, political, and epistemic condition, the losses associated with climate change also involve a distinct kind of material irreversibility: the destabilisation and transformation of climatic regimes that have underpinned all forms of life – repressive, progressive and beyond (Chakrabarty, 2009, 2021). Put slightly differently, urban inequality, displacement and spatial neglect – as well as actions taken to address them – now unfold alongside and amid rising seas, degraded ecosystems and escalating disasters that are already and permanently foreclosing many futures. Politicisation now does not always carry the analytical purchase that it once did.

To be clear, it absolutely matters whether global temperatures increase by 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, and that the nations largely responsible for such warming take action to ensure that it, and its related harms, remain as low as possible. It absolutely matters who or what benefits from urban adaptation and resilience initiatives, as well as where and in what forms crucial resources for adaptation and mitigation are distributed within cities, neighbourhoods and those who live in them (Knuth et al., 2025a, 2025b; Venner et al., 2025; Wagner and Santacruz, 2025). These are questions and concerns in which politicisation – whether by revealing injustice, advancing and insisting on alternatives, questioning expert truth claims, and so on – remain absolutely essential. But it also matters that our students are already developing orientations that look beyond these issues and that therefore point to the limits of politicisation as artifice. It matters that they are asking questions to which our time-tested political refrains and promises increasingly ring hollow.

The challenge is therefore not simply to continue building more just futures – though that of course remains crucial. The challenge is also to acknowledge that and when some futures have already been foreclosed and to develop tools to respond accordingly. Put differently, climate change demands that we recalibrate – not abandon – existing modes of urban critique. Like the tragic sensibility articulated by David Scott, this approach calls for a fidelity to the present and its losses, limits, and ruptures. What might urban inquiry look like when it takes climate loss and irreversibility not as developments to be overcome, but as distinctive, enduring urban conditions through which urban thought must now operate? I outline some ideas below, starting with a discussion of how the reading seminar conversation moved forward.

Towards a honest urbanism: Future directions for urban research and ethics

For me, and for reasons that should now be obvious, the way out of that moment of speechlessness was not to offer consoling promises of redemption or possibility in its more affirming sense. Instead, it was to return to what Wakefield (2025) herself makes clear in the book: that the Everglades restoration project, in all of its herculean ambitions, may not even work. ⁶ Conversation immediately resumed. ‘I really loved that she wrote that’, one student said. ‘It felt honest’.

That word has stayed with me. I don’t think my student meant to suggest that urban thought had, up until this point, somehow been dishonest. I think instead they meant to speak to the fact that Wakefield is doing something timely, rare and urgently needed in urban thought: naming and foregrounding uncertainty, loss, material irreversibility and the limits of knowing rather than remaining attached to resolution, ‘progress’, or the city as it is today (indeed, much of her book raises intrepid, unabashedly imaginative questions about what comes after urban resilience, what happens after the sea has swallowed the street). That my students responded this way to her work, I think, speaks to something important for urban scholars to consider in this moment: that this kind of honesty – rather than critiques grounded on an amorphous, unaccountable hope, or familiar turns towards denunciation or contingency – might set the terms of critical engagement. Put differently, we might have our students’ lived sense of disjuncture, rather than our theories, frame the stakes of the present and the kinds of questions we ask.

Our students – especially those who have come of age in climate-changed worlds – have not yet been conscripted into the older critical habits, assumptions, and political temporalities that shape much of contemporary urban thought. ⁷ They live without the inherited certainties and open futures that underpin many modes of critique – though for many, precarity and constraint have always shaped life. Because of this, I would wager that our students may be more attuned to the stakes of the present than we are. They offer not merely perspective, but grammar: ways of thinking, sensing and acting that are shaped by these emergent worlds. In this sense, our students carry not only the burden of loss, but also what Arendt ([1958]2018) calls natality: the capacity to begin anew. This is not a naïve celebration of youth or optimism. It is, however, a call to recognise that our students’ orientations emerge from a world in which many old maps no longer hold – and that their insights, built from and through this new world, give us the opportunity to rethink the very grounds of our critical and ethical commitments. But these are opportunities that urban scholars only deserve if we are willing to listen – not in order to translate student insights into existing thought, but to reorient that thought pending what those insights reveal.

In many ways, that is what I have tried to do in this essay. When I was first contacted to write this piece in October of 2024, I really had no idea what I would say. Given my research background, I was asked to write about how climate change might change how we think about futurity or how we finance cities. But those prompts could have led me just about anywhere. It was really only after this reading seminar, after I was unsettled by my student's disarmingly direct and disconcertingly clear claims, that I knew what to write. Thankfully, and as I have gestured to throughout this essay, there are bodies of scholarship that speak directly to the climate-changing worlds our students inhabit and to the new questions and grammars they are beginning to develop as a consequence. This scholarship also helps establish lines of empirical inquiry that are generative for urban research and teaching under climate change – and, crucially, identifies where and how politicisation continues to be of significant importance in pedagogy and practice.

Staying for a moment in geography – Wakefield's own field – one obvious path leads towards negative or abyssal geographies. This work, too, finds contemporary critical thought's emphasis on affirmative modes of potential and possibility, on critique as a ‘world-saving’ or ‘world-making’ endeavour, increasingly out of step with the present while at the same time reproducing the violence of the past (Chandler and Pugh, 2023). ⁸ For these authors, it is necessary to grapple with limits – specifically, ‘the limits of capacities, powers and relations’, and with ‘the problems we cannot resolve but must consider nonetheless’ (Rose et al., 2021). One especially fertile line of inquiry here relates to exhaustion – understood as both a bodily effect and spatial capacity. As Bissell (2021), drawing on Georg Simmel (2002), notes, exhaustion has long captured the attention of urban thought. The sensory intensities and social, physical demands of cities simultaneously deplete and generate: they drain energy while prompting adaptive strategies to ward off that draining, like the blasé gaze Simmel famously described. What, then, are some emergent forms of the blasé under climate change? In cities and neighbourhoods repeatedly struck by disaster or its relentless potential, what new sensorial or affective defences are being devised today, and with what effects (see, e.g., Anderson, 2023 on climate boredom)? How might these defences alter patterns of urban mobility and investment – for instance, in the avoidance, redlining, or sacrifice of places whose physical or emotional tolls have, as a result of climate change, become too great to bear, or in the construction of spaces, enclaves, and boundaries where climate change can go unsensed or unfelt? Viewed this way, emergent terrains of urban inequality include not just uneven exposures to climate-linked harm, but unequal capacities to disengage or stop sensing climate change.

But exhaustion need not lead only to islands of retreat. Precisely because cities deplete, because loss can feel and become so immense, urban trajectories of climate-linked exhaustion and loss can also catalyse new solidarities or modes of mutual recognition (Bissell, 2021; Maddrell, 2021). Extreme heat, for instance, produces not only bodily vulnerability but new public imaginaries and actions, as seen in emergent heat awareness campaigns, mutual aid networks, or activist struggles like Extinction Rebellion (O’Grady, 2025; Robson, 2025). Notably, these are social and political formations grounded not in the view that futures and worlds remain entirely open to human shaping – this, to me, is increasingly a politics of the past – but that climate change may negate the possibility of life and futurity writ large, which Robson (2025) refers to as extinction scripts. Urban researchers interested in social movements, then, might further probe how and to what effect novel publics and scripts emerge in relation to specific modalities of exhaustion linked to climate change – of places, bodies, and possibilities (Bissell, 2021). What are the spatial strategies these groups develop and deploy to address exhaustion and counteract the blasé? What explains their variance across geographic contexts?

In sociology, Rebecca Elliott (2018: 302) has used the disjunctures of the present to ask of her discipline not what it can do for the study of climate change, but what climate change can do for it. In her pioneering, reflexive work on the subject, Elliott develops a crucial answer: it pushes sociology to take on the subject of loss. The shift in orientation enables Elliott to investigate questions of ‘what does, will, or must disappear rather than … what can or should be sustained’, the latter of which has long preoccupied sociological work on sustainability (ibid p. 303). Here, Elliott sets out a comprehensive research agenda that explores, among other items, how climate loss is anticipated, governed and felt, as well as the protracted political controversies that such encounters and engagements with loss both mediate and set in motion.

As relates explicitly to urban research, scholars would do well to dive deeper into the world of finance, given its variegated entanglement in urban life and capacities to determine what and where loss is. How, for example, do climate losses filter through key financial architectures (such as insurance, property and mortgage markets) and into city planning, urban form and homeownership dynamics (see, e.g., Collier and Kirsht, 2025; Jarzabkowski et al., 2025; Knuth et al., 2025a, 2025b; Taylor et al., 2025)? What do cities and those who live in them do to demonstrate – to investors, state and national governments, or insurers, for example – that they take ongoing or anticipated climate losses ‘seriously’ and thus are ‘worthy’ of a future (Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006; Barroso-Olmedo and Grafe, 2025)? How, for that matter, do urban officials and publics weigh up the value of addressing or averting future loss in the present (Doganova, 2024), and with what distributional consequences? Equally, and in light of how climate change is increasingly used to delimit what futures are imaginable or ‘viable’, we might follow Kasia Paprocki (2018, 2019) to interrogate the politics of foreclosure: on what knowledges and assumptions do expert claims that some cities, towns and neighbourhoods have no future – or only undesirable futures – depend? How might we, as instructors, researchers, and people who care deeply about cities and the lives, imaginations, and relations bound up in them, produce knowledge that counters such claims?

Urban work on climate-linked loss might also interrogate how it mediates everyday life in cities, suburbs and small towns. This could mean examining how individuals and communities determine the costs and benefits of remaining in climate-changing or disaster-stricken hometowns or leaving them for new domains – or how loss might shift conceptions of home (e.g., its durability, meaning and value) more broadly (see, e.g., Koslov, 2016; Koslov, 2016). Relatedly, and following Bonilla (2020: 157), an urban inquiry on loss might also entail probing ‘what happens when [good life] fantasies are lost’, as, for example, rising costs of living linked to climate change slowly or suddenly undermine longstanding expectations of upward economic mobility (see also Berlant, 2011). ⁹ This is a problem domain where Caribbean and Southern thought offer important insights – not least through their sustained, historically-situated engagements with how collective life is made possible amid conditions of ongoing and foundational loss (see, e.g., Bhan et al., 2020). Rather than framing ruin, decline or disaster as states to be overcome, this work foregrounds endurance, strategic relation and refusal as modes of inhabiting worlds shaped by dispossession – and which challenge dominant narratives of displacement, resilience and retreat (see, e.g., Rosa-Rosa et al., 2025; Rhiney, 2020).

As importantly – and in the spirit of this journal's name – the disjunctures of the present also call for new dialogues across domains not often in conversation. This is precisely the challenge Zac Taylor has taken up in their work on transdisciplinary climate risk governance in the Netherlands. Rather than keeping finance at arm's length or treating it solely as an object of scholarly suspicion, Taylor convenes risk managers, planners, investors, and academics in shared forums – not out of naïveté about the role of finance in producing urban precarity, but in sharp recognition that these actors are already shaping the parameters of urban adaptation. That is, and following Elliott (2018) and Paprocki (2018, 2019), they are already determining what and where climate loss is, which losses count, and over what time horizons loss matters. Taylor's work therefore reveals not only the calculative infrastructures through which loss and value are assessed and distributed in climate-changing cities (Taylor, 2020; Taylor and Aalbers, 2022) but also the practical necessity of engaging finance as both a co-constitutor and possible negator of urban futures (Mehvar et al. 2025). For urban research, Taylor's work underscores the importance of engaging with unlikely interlocutors and opening space for critical work that neither romanticises, overplays, nor rejects the entanglement of private finance or other long-maligned ‘technical’ actors in the making of climate-changed urban worlds (see also Bryant and Webber, 2024; Chahim, 2022; Randle, 2021; Webber, 2024).

Pressing ahead

What I have tried to show in this essay is that the critical reflex to politicise is increasingly struggling to bear the weight we have placed on it. In a climate-changing world marked more and more by irreversible, material losses – of pasts, presents and futures – redemptive or emancipatory orientations to politics, to multiple possible urban becomings, do not just fall short; they risk misreading the present. What climate change demands of urban thought, and what I have attempted to take up here, is a modest but urgent recalibration rooted in an ethics of fidelity. This is an ontological and epistemological reorientation that takes climate loss, limits, and irreversible regime shifts as defining features of the urban – and that must be lived with rather than overcome.

This recalibration is not a rejection of politics or political life. Instead, to return to Arendt (2019) – and in a different register, Scott – it is a recognition that political action must respect the boundaries of the world it enters, which are themselves shaped by prior, irreversible events (see also Canovan, 1992). This is not a call to forsake instrumental reasoning or the pursuit of better outcomes, however. As Arendt reminds us, modern life has increasingly blurred the line between making and acting, and instrumentalisation often cannot be entirely avoided (it is particularly hard to avoid when tasked with writing an intervention piece like this!). Instrumental reasoning also remains wildly important in many cases, for example, regarding how and by whom resources for adaptation are distributed, as I have noted above. The task is therefore to recalibrate how we engage poiesis and praxis: to act in ways that are faithful to the world that we now and will inhabit, not only to the futures we may wish for or to design.

In this task, our students may already be ahead of us. As I have shown, they are developing grammars and orientations that emerge from the ruptures of the present. What they offer is not simply perspective but provocation. And if we are willing to take their provocations seriously – that is, if we create spaces to listen to them and to let that listening shape our teaching and research – we may find in them the beginnings of an urban thought more honest to the times and attuned to different questions. Not necessarily because the old questions were wrong, but because the present demands others. Put simply, and to paraphrase Latour (2004: 226), climate change is not a call to depression but to press ahead in thought. We should heed it.