In a chapter titled “Capital Sinks,” Ashley Dawson, in his 2017 book Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, lays out a sobering vision of the present and future of urban planning and its responses to the effects of climate change. Surveying a range of recent proposals and projects in New York, Miami, and Jakarta, most of which lie somewhere between rhetorically well-couched half measures against city carbon consumption and startling instances of willful blindness to future sea level rise, Dawson’s account makes painfully clear that the relative inaction or even disregard for the oncoming effects of present city plans is continuing to set the seeds for a catastrophic future. The titular “capital sinks” are the ongoing investments that financiers and city officials regularly sink into new seaside buildings, artificial islands, and other planned spaces likely to exacerbate the damage, death,...
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