Climate Futures Through Urban Fabrics: (De)growth, Densification, and the Politics of Scale

In the face of climate destabilizations and breakdowns, debates about the planetary future counterpose visions that draw from radically different political positionings and frameworks. Competing imaginaries of the present and future clash on many questions, but disputes over growth and scale are particularly significant for critical scholarship. Must societies build their way out of climate change’s existential threat via massive new investments in technological innovation and infrastructural (re)development, or even through risky earth system interventions such as geoengineering? How far do such initiatives enable ongoing economic growth? Do these varying programs require state coordination, and if so, at what scales and relationships to capital? Conversely, are these visions fatally flawed, requiring altogether different programs of degrowth, techno-skeptical reimagination, and infrastructural/political decentralization? We argue here that these prominent disputes on questions such as scale and ‘descaling’ for climate action require a better theory of the urban, especially density and processes of densification of human settlements. We will argue that too often today, competing scholarly and popular positions either (over)sell urban density and its potential for eco-efficiencies as a panacea or reject the urban altogether, explicitly or tacitly grouping cities with a range of other processes requiring descaling, decentralization, and relocalization.