Extreme Cities: The Perils and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change
Ashley Dawson
London and New York, NY: Verso, 2017
ISBN: 9-781784-780364
378 pp.
Currently, it is estimated that an unprecedented 55% of all people now live in an urban area or city and this figure is set to increase to some 68% by 2050. Rapid industrialization has been caused by the opportunities and jobs available in cities compared to the countryside and, increasingly, by refugees from the climate emergency, particularly in areas of the less well-reported Global South. As global temperatures rise, drought threatens food security and so people move to cities which, unfortunately, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events brought about by the same physics. In particular, cities are vulnerable because they are, necessarily, built in areas where ecotones meet – that is, different types of land cover (e.g. arable land, river or sea, forests) where different types of food are available and, hence, diversification increasingly involved the building and promoting of coastal cities: notably, in the colonized world, coastal ports were emphasised over traditional political, cultural and religious centres because they were a principal means by which resources extracted from the colonies could be sent to the colonial power. This is now a dangerous situation:
“… almost all of the world’s twenty largest cities are port cities … this has generated a deadly contradiction that is one of the most overlooked facts of the twenty-first century: the majority of the world’s megacities are in coastal zones threatened by sea level rise. Today, more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the sea; by 2025, it is estimated that this figure will reach 75 percent (pp.5-6)”
The cities themselves also generate a heat island effect which makes urban areas hotter than surrounding rural areas and which has a negative impact on air quality. I know this to be true from lived experience since my home in Hanoi suffers from what is often dangerous levels of poor air (with contributions from intensive industrialisation, lax enforcement of some environmental regulations and extensive use of coal-fired power plants) and record temperatures at some parts of the year. At least this northern capital seems to be safe from flooding from te foreseeable future, while the southern capital of Ho Chi Minh City and its surrounding area are projected to be underwater within a few decades which is likely to lead to a humanitarian crisis on an unparalleled scale.
These issues are at the heart of Ashley Dawson’s book Extreme Cities, which aims to examine the implication of these changes and their role in the emergent climate emergency. Dawson is a Professor of English at the City University of New York and does not flood the reader with ideology or with a reliance cited facts (although these are properly provided when required). As a result, the prose is credible without being reliant on footnotes:
“The globalization of production was made possible because of the rise of the shipping container, which made cheap circulation of goods around the world possible. But containerization handed immense power to capital, which became increasingly footloose while workers remained overwhelmingly tied to particular places (p.53).”
The analysis is informed by the work of David Harvey and Mike Davis, while Leon Trotsky is referenced once and Donald Trump twice (“Trump’s election victory in 2016 was also a victory for fossil fuel interests, with climate deniers, industry stalwarts, and corporate shills now commanding some of the country’s most prominent political positions, at both the state and federal levels of government (p.295)”). It is most useful in its consideration of the concept of ‘resilience’ and its implications for the treatment of cities in the Global South by the powerful figures and institutions of the Global North. Evidently, there is little appetite in the North for making the revolutionary political changes and redistribution of resources necessary to deal with the humanitarian disasters that rising sea levels will inevitably bring about (sea levels are projected to rise for a number of years even if no more carbon is released into the atmosphere from now on). As a result, the concept of resilience has been introduced as a means by which cities can, with limited support, look after themselves by, as the National Academy of Science in part concludes (p.156), the fact that “… resilience is fluid, adopting a nimble, dynamic pose.” This enables cities and their populations to ‘bounce back’ with the unstated implication that if at risk cities are not able to demonstrate this bouncebackability then it will in one form or another be their own fault:
“… above all, the vogue for resilience has to do with how it dovetails with dominant neoliberal views concerning the role of the state in hazardous times … While it is clearly in everyone’s interest to prepare for climate change, resilience seems to offer adaptive solutions without addressing the political roots of contemporary social risk and disaster (pp.170-1).”
This is, Dawson suggests, one important step in the political-ideological progress that will enable the nations of the North (or at least some forms of representatives of them) to look at potential mass migration from cities of the South and argue that the people involved have brought this upon themselves and so do not deserve to be rescued. It is an argument that is persuasive not least because it is already in operation in populist governments from the USA to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil: refugees and the poor more generally must be rejected because they are the undeserving poor who are threats to order and security who will infect and undermine society. Political amnesia (or just plain ignorance) is a very useful tool for the right.
The study of cities has become increasingly important and I myself will become more involved with it this year as the Smart City Development issue in Vietnam is going to become one of the principal research issues for RMIT Vietnam. Dawson’s book will be very useful in this regard.
John Walsh, RMIT VIetnam, February 2020
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