Redesigning Cities
Rehousing communities displaced by a changing climate
The Climate Migration Is Already Underway
This site is part of the Environmental Concern Collective. Our primary site addresses the broad spectrum of climate change concerns. Redesigning Cities narrows the focus to one of the most urgent challenges: re-housing communities displaced by rising seas, violent storms, wildfires, and other climate-driven disasters.
Humanity has gone through many designs of cities throughout history. From ancient settlements to modern megacities, we have constantly reinvented how we live together. Now, climate change is forcing us to reinvent again — and this time, we must do it better.
By the Numbers
The Books That Shape Our Thinking
These disasters will serve as reckonings for a society that has attempted to tame the forces of nature while leaving the provision of shelter to the whims of the market.
Jake Bittle, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
The world’s squatters offer different way of looking at land. Rather than treating it as an economic value, squatters live according to a more ancient notion: the idea that every person has a natural right, simply by virtue of being born, to have a home, a place, a location in the world, Their way of dealing with land offers the possibility of a more equitable city and a more just world.
Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
Cities have become our nests. One influential study of social animals argues that fro a species to get the full benefit of social living, it needs to build nests.
Greg Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History
Cities are not sustainable. They stand in the front line of environmental disaster; they will bear the brunt of its effects, along with the vast majority of the human race that lives in them. Climate change is an urban problem: as such, it calls for urban solutions.
Ben Wilson, Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City
The city can be messy, unequal, often violent for sure. But it’s still a space and maybe the only space, in which the moral and political goods of the late-modern world are not only available but even imaginable in the first place. There is something worth protecting about the city as it is now, about our ability to think and build and plot collectively, our drive to improve our situation materially, our capacity to actually impose ourselves, and our ideas, and our homes, our lives, on the material world around us.
Des Fitzgerald, The Living City: Why Cities Don’t Need to Be Green to Be Great
And so our conversion to a city-planet is by no means irreversible. The very forces that propelled the urban revolution in the first place — the scale and disconnectedness of dense urban living — could be turned against us. Rogue viruses or weapons could once again turn urban areas into sites of mass death and terror.
Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Climate-driven movements are adding to a massive migration already under way to the world’s cities. The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.
Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Rescue Our World
The researchers show that, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, ‘1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years.’
Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Rescue Our World
Achieving safe settlement for hundreds of millions of migrants could require the compulsory purchase by international consensus of land held by current states, with compensation and a stake in the new cities and their industries. It could require a new kind of international citizenship.
Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Rescue Our World
From Research to Reality
Exploring innovations in building methods for climate-resilient communities
Evaluating materials that reduce costs and increase sustainability
Original proposals for community-scale rehousing projects
Curated designs submitted by architects and planners worldwide
Let's Build the Future Together
We are building a global dialog on rehousing communities threatened by climate change. Whether you're an architect, planner, policymaker, or concerned citizen — join us.
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