While emerging from the geological and earth system sciences and frequently understood as a solely environmental matter, over the last decade the Anthropocene has become an important name for a much broader and far-reaching situation — which is as much social, philosophical, and political as it is environmental — and the widespread upheavals in thought and practice it is both inaugurating and being propelled by.

As the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler puts it, the Anthropocene is “a test and ordeal of thinking in all its forms (as knowledge of how to do, how to live and how to conceptualize).”

Indeed, for many designers, planners, scientists and critical thinkers, established modes of living, governing and thinking are now outmoded or ineffective. The frameworks that once grounded modern thought and action, invented in now-long-gone contexts, are no longer sufficient to grasp rapidly mutating realities.

Climate change, for example, is widely understood as having rendered obsolete modern forms of security and governance, planning and infrastructure; calls for experimentation with new approaches to each are now widespread. Similarly, in critical scholarship, art and design, statements proliferate to the effect that the Anthropocene “changes everything,” marking a rupture point when now-outdated rubrics must be thrown out, imagination and new ideas are needed, and a massive, multidisciplinary process of experimentation with thought, practice, and life itself is seen as imperative.

Across diverse analyses, the Anthropocene is regularly characterized in terms of urbanization. Whereas some like Jason Moore tie the emergence of the Anthropocene (or in his words, Capitalocene) to exploitations of nature and people as early as the sixteenth century, many other scholars link the epoch’s advent to the industrial urban period, identifying capitalist production of urban spaces as both Anthropocene driver and artifact.

But perhaps even more ubiquitous than historical and causal analyses are characterizations of the Anthropocene present and future as an ever more fully urban age. Here the Anthropocene is routinely linked to postulations of the planet’s urbanization, which describes either that the majority of the world’s population now lives in cities or the integration of once-distant sites into a planetwide socio-ecological network of processes and technologies. Urban systems are understood as vulnerable to and intertwined with floods, heat and other socionatural catastrophes.

But cities and urban processes are also viewed as climate change solutions. By retrofitting cities with a bricolage of resiliency infrastructures, governments and planners hope that extreme events and threshold crossings will be absorbed and governed, allowing urban spaces to maintain their basic structures and functions.

In this way, it is almost always imagined, the inexorable development of urbanization and the Anthropocene — or Urbicene, as Erik Swyngedouw has named it — will remain necessarily companion processes. In fact, for geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, cities will be one of humanity’s longest-lasting traces on the planet, future fossils whose imprint will remain long after humans.

With the urban envisioned as the inevitable form of the twenty-first century, it seems the only question mark is whether urban spaces and processes will be more or less resilient or equitable, smart or inclusive.

But what mutations of urban space and infrastructure, government and imagination, are being produced as diverse actors attempt to adapt cities to perceived Anthropocenic upheavals?

Through what sites and spaces are contemporary adaptation responses to present upheavals — epistemological, social, environmental — being enacted, and what future trajectories do they open and close?

Are these destined to be always enrolled as a means of augmenting the resilience of existing urban systems, and is urban resilience the final form of urban responses to climate change? Will the seemingly inexorable development of urbanization and the Anthropocene remain necessarily companion processes, and is planetary urbanization in fact the necessary telos and spatial limit of life in the epoch?

Will and should the urban as we know it actually survive the upending impacts of climate change or human responses? Or, if the Anthropocene truly does shatter long-held ecological, epistemological and structural certainties — could it be that even the contemporary maps of the urban condition we now hold are already becoming obsolete?

Despite the valuable studies emerging to complement what is already a wealth of critical work on urban resilience and planetary urbanization, there nevertheless remains much less focus within urban scholarship on how resilience-building efforts are restructuring urban spaces and processes, and recalibrating the imaginaries, planning frameworks, and modes of government that shape them. And what remains far more fundamentally unquestioned is the assumption that the basic spatial forms of contemporary cities and urban processes will (and should) remain (more or less resiliently) as the Anthropocene progresses.

Assumed within so much urban and Anthropocene scholarship is urban resilience: the continuing existence and expansion of the urban (all that is needed, presumably, are better ways of organizing or managing it). But if the Anthropocene is indeed a time of deep environmental and epistemological uncertainty in which long-held assumptions and processes are being upended, might it be that even our more recently “inherited cognitive maps” (Neil Brenner’s phrase) of the planetary urban condition are themselves soon to be out of date, scrambled by climate change adaptive strategies?

After all, concurrent with projections of planetary urbanization as an inevitable condition of the Anthropocene, in coastal cities from Lagos to New Orleans, alternative visions of the urban’s end are now emerging. Rather than an endless expanse of cities and urbanization processes with seemingly no terminus — the latter destined to be but fodder for ever greater resilience of the former — might the Anthropocene’s human and nonhuman dislocations produce other spaces, processes and imaginaries entirely?

These questions are not at the forefront of most critical urban theoretical agendas, but my new book, “Miami in the Anthropocene: Rising Seas and Urban Resilience,” argues that they should be. Exploring them, I argue, requires a new research agenda appropriate to the contemporary historical and political moment.

In keeping with the passing away of modern frameworks and grounds that the Anthropocene names, such an Anthropocene critical urban theory/practice — as I propose we call it — resists the temptation to rely on inherited spatial concepts — and when appropriate, even newer ones like planetary urbanization or resilience. It abandons assumptions as to what urban life in the Anthropocene is, can, or will be. It attends to how 21st-century Anthropocenic urban transformations are producing novel spatial and imaginal mutations, including nascent spaces and visions of human and nonhuman life that push beyond currently dominant paradigms such as urban resilience.

If urban thinkers want to avoid being “late to the party,” as Roger Keil puts it, we need an urban theoretical/practical approach that amplifies and expands on Brenner’s “urban theory for our time” challenge — and takes it to its fullest possible conclusions.

Adapted from Miami in the Anthropocene: Rising Seas and Urban Resilience by Stephanie Wakefield. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2024 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. This excerpt appears courtesy of the author and the publisher.

This post was originally published on Next City.