‘All that is Solid … ’

Abstract

As critical urbanists confront climate change, and prospective climate responses, we must ask crucial questions about the ‘lifetime’ of today’s urban fabrics and metropolitan forms. How durable or ephemeral will existing urban geographies prove in the face of societal devaluations and destruction associated with climate change? Will breaks in and with existing urban forms be suffered through climate change impacts, or waged proactively in the name of deep decarbonization? Dystopian climate imaginaries present such material ruptures, mass stranding of real estate assets, and ‘premature death’ as an existential urban crisis. I maintain here that they are, rather, business as usual for urban capitalism, and its own longer-unfolding crisis. Property developers and appraisers have frequently truncated the lifetime of urban built environments, in how they have represented buildings and their long-term value—and non-value—and in how these representations have become material fact. I consider some bodies of critical urban scholarship necessary to exploring such processes and their climate significance, an important task for City going forward. I argue that in contexts like the United States, this charge demands creative engagements between cultural studies and political economy. I consider several relevant discussions now emerging in urban political economy. First, I explore Tapp and Kay’s (2019. “Fiscal geographies: ‘Placing’ taxation in urban geography.” Urban Geography 40 (4): 573–581.) call for new ‘fiscal geographies’ as a provocation for urban climate futures. Specifically, I discuss how property taxation and valuation practices have become central to the ‘disposability’ and premature degradation of US urban built environments, and the climate significance of this wasting. Second, I consider emerging critical geographies of insurance as a window into urban coastal futures under climate change. Following recent interventions such as Johnson (2015. “Catastrophic fixes: Cyclical devaluation and accumulation through climate change impacts.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 47 (12): 2503–2521) and Taylor (2020. “The real estate risk fix: Residential insurance-linked securitization in the Florida metropolis.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. OnlineFirst), urbanists must question how promised financial solutions for climate change’s threat to these spaces risk compounding mass devaluations and erasures to come.

Keywords:

• climate change
• urban futures
• building lifetimes
• fiscal geographies
• insurance

Acknowledgements

This discussion owes much to ongoing conversations with Nate Millington and John Stehlin, as well as within Durham’s Economy and Culture, Urban Worlds, and Geographies of Life research clusters. It bears a debt of much longer standing to Paul Groth for his deep insights into American cultural landscapes and their making, unmaking, and remaking. Many thanks also to Andrea Gibbons, an anonymous reviewer, and the editorial team at City for their labors and patience in shepherding this collection into being.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 And see, for example, Right to the City-influenced work on use values versus exchange values under formalization processes (e.g. Fawaz 2009).

2 For example, evolving capitalist variants of the predatory landlord (alongside pre- and non-capitalist forms) as a speculative under-maintainer of buildings, from Engels’ Manchester (1845) [2009] to 20th and 21st century New York and Berlin (Fields and Uffer 2016; Smith 1996; Teresa 2016), and far beyond.

3 Notwithstanding communities’ efforts to repurpose these frequently vacant and abandoned spaces, often amid broader landscapes of urban and rural disinvestment (Christensen 2008).

4 Alongside parallel imaginaries of rural defensibility-in-place now being advanced by international actors against the specter of the urban climate refugee, for example in coastal Bangladesh (Cons 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Knuth

Sarah Knuth is Assistant Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK. Email: [email protected]