Cities will disappear

This is a guest post by Tony Fry, author of Disappearing Cities

While the arrival of climate change is recognised by vast numbers of people globally, the scale and diversity of its impacts are not well comprehended. There is now a lot of data, and only a limited understanding, and very little visual evidence, of what is coming. Yet without knowledge and images, it’s hard for people to grasp not just specific events but also how they will arrive over time, at scale and with what consequences. Existing evidence of irreversible and increasing global warming makes clear that vast numbers of people are going to be displaced. Some informed sources say it could be as many as three billion by the end of the century. What this would mean is a disaster beyond the capacity of governments and humanitarian organisations to cope. It would include the destruction of many major cities and deep environmental, social and economic crises. The stories in the book create a sense of this future.

      Effective responsive action depends on a clear understanding of the situation to respond to and the availability of the means to do so. Responding to climate change equally requires action in time – and this means acting in the medium of time in the moment of need, futurally and with a sense of urgency. To motivate such action now, into what is a global and escalating crisis and process, requires defining and planning action. The more and the better the prefiguratively action before a disaster strikes, the lower its impacts. Such thinking underscores the stories of the book. Its form and content are the product of fact producing fiction and then thereafter advancing understanding. But this cannot happen unless the ‘might be’ is able to be imagined. The book seeks to do this, but not in a stilted way, but rather in the evocative spirit of Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. It was first published in Italy in 1972 (English translation 1974); it is an exceptional work of insight and imagination. Writing over fifty short stories about invented cities, inspired by Venice, he created an imagined world – one drawn out of the form, character, mood and mystery of the city he knew and loved. In some respect, Disappearing Cities, while totally different, is a companion to his Invisible Cities. It reflects in a world changed as a result of forces and events over a period of more than fifty years later. Rather than focusing on a celebration of cities as Calvino did, my book mourns their impending loss.

      The stories are gathered in three thematic chapters. They blend fact and fiction, the actual and the possible. This first chapter describes cities disappearing as a result of acts of the forces of nature that often converge and are worsened by the effects of climate change. The story of eleven cities make up this chapter. Chapter two presents disappearance due to acts of unnatural nature, those caused by the impacts of human industrial activities on Earth and the climatic system, most specifically global warming. The effects of these changes are floods, landslides, the rising levels of oceans, droughts and wild fires, with some areas becoming so hot that they become uninhabitable. The chapter consists of twenty-three stories that allow the form of these impacts to be imagined. The third chapter presents how cities can disappear by purely unnatural means, such as wars, industrial accidents and via the introduction of life-world changing technology. There are sixteen stories in this chapter.

      Like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Disappearing Cities will appeal to people who are interested in cities – architects, planners in particular, as well as readers concerned about the coming impacts of climate change. But at the same time, it also aims at a wider audience as it tells a human stories that are absent from almost all writing on climate change. Its intent is to give a sense of the experience of coming of a changing world and climate impacts upon people’s lives and emotions.