Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change

For me, this was exceptionally useful. New and deeper insights into what is already happening Full and convincing detail, case studies, but also put into the regional and global context. I have read so much about global indications, melting ice, temperature increasing, more and bigger storms, rains and droughts, desertification... Now I feel I have a clearer and more detailed understanding.

The book highlights the necessity for a just transition in the age of extremes. The vision of neoliberalism has yielded flawed outcomes and an assertive counterbalancing by society and the state might be required.

Even better than Water Will Come! Ashley Dawson is a genius, and her work shows it. Surely a must for the Annotated Bibliography on Construction Ethics I am completing.

A well written book about climate change. I should have bought this book as soon as it came out.

vital topic

Excellent!

Dawson (English, CUNY; Extinction: A Radical History, 2016) has published and edited numerous books and essays and is a member of Duke University’s Social Text collective, which focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, race and environment. From 2010-2014 he was co-editor of Social Text Online and from 2012-2014 also edited the Journal of Academic Freedom. His current work deals mainly with the impact of radical environmental change and issues of eco-justice, the idea that needed environmental reform cannot occur without equally serious social and political reform. In this present book, he argues forcefully that much of current environmental reform efforts fail to address the problems we face because they assume that growth is the only way to a healthy economy, or, to put it another way, that retreat from endangered environmental zones (low lying coastal areas) is not to be considered. One of his examples is Hurricane Sandy, the deadliest and most destructive hurricane in the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season and the second most expensive in history in terms of the material damage it left in its wake. As to cleanup efforts post-Sandy, much of the money and time spent went to rebuild structures in coastal areas at risk of future destruction. (A note: in 20123, 32 million people worldwide were forced to relocate temporarily or permanently as a result of climate damage. That is not a small number, and subsequent years bode fair to be much worse.)Dawson writes of New Orleans post-Katrina, a city low almost at sea level to begin with, its marshlands in rapid retreat, delta sediment deposit dropping and the sea level rising, salt leaking into the very soil on which the city was built. New Orleans, he posits, is the “New Atlantis” –do what you will to save it, it is likely to be buried by the sea not too far off in our future. Current efforts to prevent or ameliorate future storm damage have been blatantly insufficient, argues Dawson.I have noted Dawson’s observations on these two American cities but his focus is worldwide with examples from all over the globe. He presents a powerful and convincing case that: neoliberalist ideas get in the way of addressing systemic global issues of environmental deterioration; we radically underestimate the projected rise in global water level and still waste our money rebuilding along the coast in places we can’t ultimately protect, using outmoded models that amortize the construction of new high rise buildings and skyscrapers over a single generation (rapid ROI) with no thought for the burden left to our heirs two and three generations on; we initiate reforms piecemeal and timidly. It’s hard not to see it all crashing down on us two or three generations off from now. But politicians and investors don’t think that far off, only in one or at most two decades. The potential for short term profit obviates the need to consider long term risk.I have to add that there is something I do not like –maybe “admire” is a better word-- about this book. The language could be simpler. I’m a former academic myself but I’m uncomfortable with academic jargon and hate academic buzzwords, and Dawson falls back on them all too often in this book. I don’t feel also that Dawson always argues fairly. I think he cooks the books in his favor by the choice of terms, examples, and by shortening time spent on laying out opposing points of view.My model for argument like this is Raul Hillberg’s The Destruction of the European Jewry. Hillberg doesn’t polemicize in this massive, three-volume book. Rather, he presents and he explains. That’s it! The structure is step by step advance –logical and hard to refute—and the tone is matter of fact so as to refute any charge of emotionalism. I would like to see Dawson restructure his argument, presenting along the way the best case he can make for opposing views, so that when he demolishes their arguments (easily done), the presentation of his own case looks irrefutable. I would appreciate coming across fewer value-laden catch phrases: “anticapitalist climate justice,” for instance, seems particularly ill-fitted, not to say vague. It’s a label not a definition or explanation.Reservations or not, this is a book that deserves to be read by all who take these serious issues seriously.

My frame/desiderata may well be different from those of other readers.That said: I am always on the lookout for books that provide (what I regard) as the necessary facts about the unsustainablity and projected clear untenability of our current development and habitation practices, and provide them in an accessible way. It is, admittedly, something of a tough balancing act. By my lights, though, Dawson’s new book just doesn’t strike the needed balance...and this is an area in which there are a lot of more successful competitors.Neither I nor my students shrink from academic (as opposed to popular) presentations. The problem here is that the game is not worth the candle. The book could and should have been less tedious and ‘complexified.’ *I* did not enjoy ploughing through it, and I can’t use it in teaching. For me, then, it’s a non-starter. The four-star rating represents my attempt of stand back and make a conjecture about how other readers might see the book. Three stars seemed too ungenerous.