Miami (2019) | Denys Kostyuchenko / Unsplash License
Do cities have a place in our future? Geographers such as Stephanie Wakefield have identified urbanization as both driver and product of the Anthropocene, the “geological time impacted by human activities.” The uneven capitalist productions of urban spaces, along with operational landscapes required to sustain urban life—such as global supply chain and extraction sites—are deepening the manifold socio-ecological crises that characterize this “human epoch.” Yet city officials and planners posit that urban processes are solutions to the effects of climate change in the form of urban resilience—that is, the ability of infrastructure to absorb and govern climate problems to maintain socioeconomic status quo.
The extent to which the notion of the “urban” is still relevant in imagining alternative futures is the question undergirds Wakefield’s new book. In Miami in the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Wakefield focuses on the transformations of urban infrastructure, knowledge, and imaginaries in Miami since the early 2000s.
The book problematizes “resilience,” a widely embraced, self-legitimating approach to urbanization. Rather than resolving the causes of environmental issues, urban resilience projects often reproduce or perpetuate the same crises they are designed to manage, a contradiction epitomized by the 100 Resilient Cities initiative launched by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2013. For instance, many “resilience” projects might mean a tradeoff in equity—already vulnerable communities become more vulnerable to climate crises. In other cases, resilience projects move the problem to a different area of a city instead of addressing its root causes. To break away from this approach, Wakefield argues for disinheriting what has been called “urban concepts under stress,” and instead calls for imagining new practices at the intersection of climate change and adaptation in industrialized coastal cities.
Miami conjures contrasting images. At once sunny and shady, idyllic and risky, the South Floridian city is shaped by immigrant cultures; at the same time, it’s been aggressively conditioned by real estate speculation. From its early marketing as a snowbirds’ tropical paradise to its subsequent reputation as a laundering haven for Central and South American assets, the city has transformed from a swamp sitting on porous limestone to a capitalist growth machine.
Indeed, as Wakefield points out in the first chapter, the entanglement between property values and climate adaptations defines Miami’s historically and geologically specific form of urban resilience—or more accurately, resilient urbanization—compared to cities such as New York. Between 2013 and 2015, various media outlets highlighted this flood-prone city’s impending apocalyptic risks. Miami was famously described by the Dutch water management expert Henk Ovink, as the “new Atlantis,” poised to be partially submerged by the ocean. His 2020 report The Business Case for Resilience in Southeast Florida estimated that a 17-inch sea-level rise would result in $4.2 billion lost in property value and $28 million lost in sales, property, and tourism tax by 2040. City officials saw resilience measures critical to not only urban daily life but also for maintaining economic confidence for insurance companies and credit-rating agencies, such as Moody’s. Resilience infrastructure is part of what Wakefield terms “technologies of anticipatory risk governance.” Since the launching of different climate initiatives, Miami is now billed as the “resilient city” par excellence, the so-called “living laboratory” of pioneering littoral urban futures.
The book’s first three chapters analyze the three types of infrastructure at play in Miami’s efforts to mitigate impacts of climate change, which Wakefield separates into “gray,” “green,” and “social” categories. Each involves a diverse set of actors and agencies operating at different scales. “Miami Beach Rising Above,” the city’s “gray” (i.e., concrete) resilience infrastructure campaign, entails constructions of elevated streets, sea walls, and stormwater pump stations in the photo-ready neighborhoods that attract high-earning transplants working in sectors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Launched by former Mayor Philip Levine at breakneck speed, “Rising Above” is a top-down project aimed at conserving, rather than reimagining, Miami’s infrastructure; it is, arguably, first and foremost a bid to shore up investor confidence in the face of projections of trillion-dollar ruinations due to sea-level rise and storm surges. Engaging a very different demographic than “Rising Above” is the “Resilient 305” plan, a “social” category effort that employs the technique of “urban future scenarios visioning” first developed by Herman Kahn at the RAND Corporation to anticipate the unknown in dealing with climate risk. The plan enrolls low-income citizens and prepares them to endure extreme climate events, in what Wakefield calls “the enframing of human capacities and practices” into social infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Project casts the Everglades wetland ecosystem as a form of “green” natural infrastructure. The restoration of fresh-water flow is understood and operationalized as the remedy to saltwater intrusion into the Biscayne Aquifer, the source of Miami-Dade County’s drinking water. These three cases of technological, social, and ecological infrastructure are components of a productive resilient city. Their ultimate aim is, in Wakefield’s words, “to recalibrate management techniques so as to preserve and converse order, profit, and existing urban systems.” To make room for an agenda for what she terms “Anthropocenic urban theory,” Wakefield rejects urban resilience as the telos of our current epoch. It is the city itself that is coming to an end.
Current resilience measures insist on the continuing value of cities as we know them, even as climate change means that the measures taken to preserve them must become more extreme, and more costly. Wakefield proposes a different tack: The relevance of our cities, she writes, is in their potential for “Anthropocenic urbicide.” Although urbicide is traditionally understood as a warfare tactic of obliterating an enemy’s urban foundation, Wakefield argues that it can also be considered a form of creative destruction. She cities examples of climate retreats, such as the calls to relocate populations in the flood-prone southern Louisiana. The aim here is twofold: to dismantle the city physically and to sever global infrastructural links strategically. The recent supply chain disruptions caused by natural disasters, trade wars, and calamitous conflicts have demonstrated that capitalist infrastructural and production networks are unsustainable and vulnerable. Wakefield’s “Anthropocenic urbicide” dislodges these networks from coastal enclaves, clearing the way for new modes of living.
In this paradigm, the alternative to resilience infrastructure is what Wakefield calls “islandization.” Referencing South Florida island imaginary projects by the politician Tom Gustafson, the design collective Alliance of the Southern Triangle, and the architect Jeffrey Huber, Wakefield details a thought experiment of an aquatic-based transformation of the coastal region into artificial islands of localized production and resources. The city would be swallowed by the sea, but its material basis could be repurposed. This proposition’s radical departure from conventional thinking is exhilarating—I have in mind the speculative images by the artist Olalekan Jeyifous—and its provocations are buttressed by Wakefield’s lengthy counterarguments.
If the market-driven paradigm of urbanization is the root of current socio-ecological crises, then it makes sense to challenge and uproot this process. Yet initiating alternative forms of habitation demands new political imagination. In what political regime would islandization be possible? A collective untethering from infrastructural webs may require our biggest infrastructural apparatus yet.
