Toward Climate Form

Author(s): Lizzie Yarina

Source: Log , Fall 2019, No. 47, Overcoming Carbon Form (Fall 2019), pp. 85-92
Published by: Anyone Corporation

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26835035

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Lizzie Yarina
1. Bill de Blasio, “My New Plan to
Climate-Proof Lower Manhattan,” New
York, March 13, 2019, http://nymag.com/
intelligencer/2019/03/bill-de-blasio-
my-new-plan-to-climate-proof-lower-
manhattan.html.
2. “It’s everyone’s preference not to do
development there. But we may need
some development to finance it.” James
Patchett, president of the NYC Economic
Development Corporation, quoted in Justin
Davidson, “The De Blasio Climate Plan Is
Big, Ambitious, and Pretty Vague,” New
York, March 25, 2019, http://nymag.com/
intelligencer/2019/03/the-de-blasio-
climate-plan-is-big-ambitious-and-very-
vague.html.
3. See Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits
to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s
Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New
York: Universe Books, 1972).
4. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, “Summary for Policymakers
of IPCC Special Report on Global
Warming of 1.5C approved by govern-
ments,” October 8, 2018, https://www.
ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/11/
pr_181008_P48_spm_en.pdf.
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Toward Climate Form
In March 2019, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio
announced an aggressive, city-led plan to “climate-proof ”
Lower Manhattan. Central to the project is a 10-billion-dol-
lar infrastructure and land reclamation scheme to protect the
city’s Financial District and Seaport against storm surge and
sea level rise. The plan also expands Manhattan into the East
River.1 Certainly, as Hurricane Sandy violently illustrated,
New York will need to transform in order to survive climate
change. In this case, climate change adaptation via literal
expansion of ground goes beyond hazard mitigation engi-
neering to offer potential space for expanding the Manhattan
skyline of financial prowess and speculative luxury develop-
ment: “an offshore Hudson Yards.”2 Projects like this present
climate change not only as a risk but also as an opportunity –
creating flagship spaces for accumulation. De Blasio’s Lower
Manhattan Coastal Resiliency Project is reflective of a global
trend toward climate adaptation projects that conflate resil-
ience with growth. When climate adaptation is poised as a
catalyst for growth, so-called resilience projects themselves
become carbon forms, participating in the climate crisis they
purport to defend against.
Climate Resilience as Carbon Form:
The (Green) Growth Machine
The idea that growth in its current resource- and carbon-
intensive form is irreconcilable with environmental stability is
not new. The Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth
used rigorous computer simulations to argue that given that
era’s resource-heavy growth trends, the global limit to growth
would be reached within the century, and society would begin
to crumble.3 Today’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change reports make even more urgent that growth need not
only be stopped but reversed: scientists plea that in order to
avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, we
will have to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2030, and
that this will require “unprecedented changes in all aspects of
society.”4 Around the same time as Limits to Growth, Harvey
Molotch posited that growth is fundamental to the nature
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5. Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth
Machine: Toward a Political Economy of
Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82,
no. 2 (September 1976): 309–10. Emphasis
original.
6. See Naomi Klein, This Changes
Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
7. Thea Riofrancos, “Plan, Mood,
Battlefield – Reflections on the Green
New Deal,” Viewpoint Magazine, May
16, 2019, http://www.viewpointmag.
com/2019/05/16/plan-mood-battlefield-
reflections-on-the-green-new-deal/.
8. See Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture
Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 2–35.
9. Hillary Angelo, “Added value?
Denaturalizing the ‘good’ of urban green-
ing,” Geography Compass 13, no. 8 (2019).
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of contemporary cities. Molotch’s 1976 text, “The City as
Growth Machine,” argues that “the political and economic
essence of virtually any given locality, in the present American
context, is growth.”5 If both are true – that we are reaching
limits to growth, and that the city is a growth machine – then
it is urgent that all architecture and urbanism, but particu-
larly architecture and urbanism that purport to make us safer
from climate risks, don’t continue to build on this dangerous
equation. With atmospheric carbon dioxide recently surpass-
ing 415 parts per million (the highest value ever recorded),
architectures of resilience cannot be architectures of growth.
Growth is fundamental to neoliberalism, a now global
economic and ideological framework that centers on the
market as the organizing principle for society. Under neo-
liberalism, everything is commodified. This system of free
trade emerged in response to the Fordist-Keynesian capital-
ism of the 1950s and ’60s, which, in contrast, favored strong
state regulation of a market system. The climate is an exter-
nality in neoliberal market-based calculations, and deregula-
tion further eschews accountability (individual, corporate,
national, etc.) for how growth damages our shared climate.
As Naomi Klein argues, neoliberal capitalism’s fundamentally
extractive ideology is destructive to the climate in its very
essence.6 As such, architectural projects that are part of this
growth machine are inherently carbon forms. Attempts to
halt or reverse the looming climate catastrophe require new
ideologies as well as new typologies. Or as another author
succinctly puts it, “The root causes of climate crisis – profit-
seeking competition, endless growth, exploitation of humans
and nature, and imperial expansion – can’t also be the solu-
tion to climate crisis.”7
Yet, in an era when neoliberalism has penetrated every
aspect of our lives, it can feel impossible to disentangle our
work as architects, landscape architects, and urban design-
ers from growth. As early as 1969, Manfredo Tafuri argued
that it was no longer possible to design or critique outside of
capitalism.8 In New York, large-scale urban interventions in
multiple eras, from Hudson Yards to the High Line to Central
Park, have served as drivers of speculative development and
high-end consumption, often while displacing society’s most
vulnerable – those likely to suffer the heaviest burdens under
climate change. The public-good nature of large projects,
and landscape interventions in particular, may obscure their
ethical faults,9 be it the plutocratic condos zoned along the
High Line or the use of Central Park as a tool for removing
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Bjarke Ingels Group, BIG U, New York,
2014. Drawing courtesy the architect.
10. Voluntary buyouts occurred in the
Ocean Breeze, Oakwood Beach, and
Graham Beach neighborhoods of Staten
Island; as of August 2019, these neighbor-
hoods, now a patchwork of vacant lots, will
be behind a 5.3-mile seawall that is also part
of de Blasio’s plan. See Hilary Whiteman,
“Staten Island seawall: Designing for cli-
mate change,” CNN, July 14, 2019, https://
www.cnn.com/style/article/staten-island-
seawall-climate-crisis-design/index.html.
11. See Susan S. Fainstein, “Resilience and
justice: planning for New York City,” Urban
Geography 39, no. 8 (2018): 1273–75.
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freed slaves and other marginalized communities from the
city. Similarly, resilience projects under capitalist hegemo-
nies (however unconsciously) fail to ask whose resiliency
they enable and fail to interrogate their own participation in
petro-capitalist regimes.
De Blasio’s grand plan for a resilient Manhattan visi-
bly places emphasis on the city’s economic heart: the proj-
ect’s biggest investment is in land reclamation around the
Financial District and Seaport, which would both protect
the area and potentially create new spaces for financial elites
to continue to enact growth. If the Financial District’s rec-
lamation isn’t funded by the federal government (highly
unlikely, especially under the current administration), it will
be funded by private development. While other vulnerable
parts of the city are also addressed in the plan, the expan-
sion of Manhattan up to two blocks into the East River is
the most dramatic, and most costly. In contrast, following
the destruction in Staten Island caused by Hurricane Sandy
in 2012, the initial response was largely not to fortify but to
retreat, illustrative of the way cost-benefit analyses priori-
tize the defense of capital.10 As Susan Fainstein has argued,
resilience planning in New York is part and parcel of the
urban growth machine.­11 An alibi for the proposed extension
of ground is a purported lack of space for other infrastruc-
tures: the berm in the 2014 BIG U, Manhattan’s preceding
resilience scheme, would require moving or demolishing
FDR Drive, which runs along the East River. De Blasio’s new
land reclamation plan is argued for, in part, due to the per-
ceived impossibility of interrupting traffic on the FDR. The
mayor may be advocating drastic transformations to the city
to deflect climate risks, but it seems carbon forms like the
highway remain untouchable.
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12. The BIG U, proposal on Rebuild by
Design website, http://www.rebuild-
bydesign.org/data/files/675.pdf.
13. Resist Delay Store Discharge: A
Comprehensive Urban Water Strategy,
proposal on Rebuilt by Design website,
http://www.rebuildbydesign.org/data/
files/673.pdf.
14. “HUD Rebuild by Design,”
OMA, https://oma.eu/projects/
hud-rebuild-by-design.
15. Audrey Wachs, “The Rockefeller
Foundation nixed its resilient cities
program. Now it’s launching a new one,”
Architect’s Newspaper, July 9, 2019, https://
archpaper.com/2019/07/rockefeller-
foundation-resilient-cities-new-program/.
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The earlier BIG U proposal, designed by a team of archi-
tecture firms led by Bjarke Ingels Group, was part of Rebuild
by Design (RBD), a HUD-funded competition in which mul-
tidisciplinary design teams developed a series of resilience
plans for sites across the New York metropolitan area in the
wake of Hurricane Sandy. Successful projects, measured in
part by community buy-in, received partial funding via HUD
CDBG-DR grants. Many of the funded RBD proposals fold in
concepts of growth as justifications for resilience interven-
tions. The BIG U proposal argues that flood protection should
be tied to benefits, including “possibilities for growth.” In
speech bubbles the proposal announces, “The Sandy affected
region faces a dilemma: vibrant urban centers, poised for
growth, are simultaneously threatened by their waterfront
locations!” and asks, “How can the city plan for it’s resiliency
while also planning for it’s future growth? [sic]”12 This lan-
guage signifies to investors and economic elites that this proj-
ect’s version of resilience in the face of climate change not only
means that their investments are safe but that adaptation will
not come at the cost of the economic system on which their
power relies – even if this occurs at the expense of the planet.
Ideas around growth and development appear at the core
of the majority of the RBD projects, and similar language
appears in other RBD proposals: for example, the OMA proj-
ect for Hoboken, New Jersey – Resist Delay Store Discharge
– highlights the creation of resiliency-supported develop-
ment with an emphasis on two redevelopment areas, both
coastal sites that are likely vulnerable to rising seas.13 As stated
on OMA’s website, growing resiliently is a key concept, and
“this will mean focusing new growth in those areas that can
be optimally defended.”14 Though they express a need to pro-
tect “assets at risk,” vulnerable communities appear to be of
less concern. In fact, the need for growth is baked into the very
design of the RBD competition: the HUD grants are not suffi-
cient to finance these massive projects in full, and the difference
is intended to be covered by private development. A similar
framework is illustrated by the Rockefeller Foundation’s recent
shift, after announcing the closure of the 100 Resilient Cities
program, to a “market-based” approach to supporting climate
adaptation.15 The narratives of the resilient growth machine
embedded in these projects are not intentionally nefarious; they
simply illustrate an imaginary of resilience under the hege-
mony of neoliberal capitalism, where project instigators and
design teams are unable to see how large-scale urban inter-
ventions can occur without being supported by development
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KuiperCompagnons, Great Garuda,
National Capital Integrated Coastal
Development master plan, Jakarta,
2013. © OpenStreetMap.
16. Piet Dircke, quoted in Jeff Chu, “How
the Netherlands Became the Biggest
Exporter of Resilience,” Fast Company,
November 1, 2013, https://www.
fastcompany.com/3020918/how-the-
netherlands-became-the-biggest-exporter-
of-resilience.
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opportunities. These projects are a product of neoliberalism,
and they are also complicit with its perpetuation.
While the language of growth in RBD proposals is woven
with feel-good symbols like community collaboration, native
plantings, and public space, in the rapidly growing cities
of the Global South, the collusion between resiliency and
growth becomes more explicit. A visceral example is Jakarta.
In 2013, the Indonesian government announced a fantastical
proposal to cope with the city’s increasingly problematic
flooding: a massive infrastructure of seawalls and islands
spanning the Jakarta bay in the form of the Garuda, a mythi-
cal Indonesian bird and national symbol. Reclamation and
real estate agreements would provide a financing structure
for the project, and would allow a new luxury city to develop
in the harbor away from central Jakarta’s traffic and pollu-
tion. The project’s massive scale would not only facilitate a
construction boom but also cloak Indonesia’s capital city in
a graphic image of protection from rising seas, encourag-
ing continued development onshore as well (even as much
of the city sinks well below sea level through a combination
of development-amplified subsidence and rising sea level).
Reproaches of the seawall scheme are myriad, from alleged
kickbacks to corrupt politicians to the potential creation of a
“black lagoon” inside the seawall system if other engineering
mechanisms fail. While the grandest components of the plan
appear to have been scaled back amid well-publicized criticism,
portions appear to be moving forward. A similar trend super-
imposing growth and resilience is evident in plans for many of
the world’s most climate-vulnerable cities, from a riverfront
road and levee in Bangkok, which couples heavy-handed infra-
structure with luxury development, to the proposed construc-
tion of ring dikes in Ho Chi Minh City, which neatly remove
the urban poor and replace them with high-end development
atop and inside the berms’ new ground. Growth is essential
to the funding mechanisms for these projects, which rely on
international banks and private real estate developers.
Another common denominator across these projects is the
Dutch, whose experts are ubiquitous in large-scale resilience
planning. Given a long history of negotiating their proximity
to sea level, the Dutch have begun to promote their expertise
to coastal and delta cities around the world. As one execu-
tive at a Dutch design and engineering firm proclaims, “We
are branding this knowledge around the globe, and we are
benefitting from it.”16 Resilience has become a key export, a
strategy outlined explicitly in Rotterdam’s climate adaptation
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17. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon,
Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 7.
18. “T-A-L Statement on the Green New
Deal,” The Architecture Lobby, http://
architecture-lobby.org/project/t-a-l-
statement-on-the-green-new-deal/.
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plan. Not only resilient designs but also resilience knowl-
edge are incorporated into nationalist growth strategies. The
commodification of resilience makes it part of the neoliberal
marketplace, undermining its capacity to combat the climate
destruction ingrained in our global market system.
Adaptation and Adiaphorization: Toward Climate Form
Projects that aim to truly contribute to resilience across scales
(both the specific site in question and the global climate) must
decouple climate adaptation from growth. The pervasiveness
of neoliberal ideology makes it hard to see how adaptation
proposals at the massive scale that climate change already
necessitates can possibly be funded and implemented without
also promoting growth. To support urban projects, politi-
cians rely on growth to improve their tax base and attract
private investment. Cities compete for capital that is detached
from place, and developers compete to make architecture as
cheaply as possible in order to achieve the highest profit mar-
gins, regardless of the quality or durability or resilience of
these forms over time. Design firms compete (often literally)
to create buildings, landscapes, and urban plans that elegantly
fulfill RFPs and directly support these growth machine logics.
Further, the phenomenon of adiaphorization, where “sys-
tem and processes become split off from any consideration of
morality,” makes it difficult to comprehend the many ways in
which contemporary architectures and urbanisms are fun-
damentally entangled with both capitalism and the climate.17
The adiaphorization of climate adaptation has made many
of us oblivious not only to the carbon footprint of sand, steel,
cement, and plywood but also to the more systemic questions
of how the production of architecture and cities contributes
to the socioecological processes that are destroying global
environmental stability. Metrics beyond the monetary for
considering the success of projects and cities are essential.
Instead of asking how private development can finance
revolutionary resilient transformation in our cities, we might
consider how climate-adapted architecture relates to trans-
formative social and political movements – models like the
Green New Deal call for public rather than private invest-
ment in transformative change. Groups like the Architecture
Lobby are beginning to do just that, calling for transforma-
tive change in their Green New Deal statement: “Architects
must advocate for policies that reimagine resiliency at all
scales, rather than incrementally repairing and replacing
existing systems.”18
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 If carbon forms were derived from a specific set of social,
political, and intellectual frameworks, then in order to move
beyond carbon forms, new frameworks are required. To
establish new forms for our climate-changed planet, a cul-
ture of carbon must be superseded by a culture of climate.
For designers, a culture of climate would embody modes
of thinking and designing with a broader scope of concern
for how architectures, landscapes, and urbanisms relate to
environmental crises alongside parallel issues of sociospatial
inequities. Every spatial design project is already intrinsi-
cally entangled with climate, whether in terms of the atmo-
spheric carbon it produces and/or captures, or in terms of its
mediation of environmental risks associated with our hotter
planet. Through new design cultures, we might begin to work
toward a new order of forms – climate forms – that could
mitigate both climate change (lessen atmospheric carbon)
and its impacts (storms, droughts, heat waves, rising seas).
A culture of climate considers a building not as an object
but as a system vitally connected to global atmospheric dynam-
ics, flows of materials and labor, human lifestyles, habits, econ-
omies, and politics. A climate form is a lever that can transform
these various networks, which in their current orientations are
playing a fundamental role in destroying our planet. A carbon
form, on the other hand, crystallizes these flows based on
existing hegemonies of growth and consumption.
The disposition of a climate form would not be that of an
object but of a thing, defined by Bruno Latour as a collection of
codependent and evolving ideas, networks, histories, materials
ecologies, and sociopolitical relationships. While the climate
form has not yet been fully rendered, some familiar typolo-
gies are instructive: the public library, which suggests that
knowledge should be collectively owned, and extensive public
housing systems such as those in Singapore or Vienna, which
insist that everyone has the right to housing in the city and
near to jobs and amenities. While these types do not explic-
itly deal with climate adaptation, they reduce social vulner-
ability as a whole while reflecting a society based on reduced
consumption, shared resources, and equity. In this way, these
types reflect the larger value systems of a society. We might
also consider cases like ENLACE, a public corporation created
by a coalition of frequently flooded, low-income communities
in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The community coalition enshrined
ENLACE in Puerto Rican law and created a land trust,
designed to allow vulnerable households to relocate within the
community and stave off land grabs and redevelopment that

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19. Lizzie Yarina, Larisa Ovalles, and
Miho Mazereeuw, “A Retreat Critique:
Deliberations on Design & Ethics in
the Flood Zone,” Journal of Landscape
Architecture: For Whom? (forthcoming).
20. See Keller Easterling, Medium Design
(Moscow: Strelka Press, 2018).
Lizzie Yarina is a research fellow at
the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced
Urbanism and a PhD candidate in the
MIT Department of Urban Studies and
Planning.
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occur all too often in the name of reducing risk.19 In this way
the community coalition improves their own resilience while
deflecting speculative accumulation. ENLACE’s architects and
planners serve as both designers and mediators, planning the
larger rehabilitation process through an extensive participa-
tory process. Similarly, in coastal Louisiana, the Isle de Jean
Charles tribe’s plan for relocation to an inland site ensures
housing for all displaced tribal members, and the site design,
created in collaboration with Evans+Lighter Landscape
Architects, includes systems that allow the community not
only to be self-sufficient but also to nurture their landscape-
attuned tribal heritage: integrated permaculture systems,
distributed solar, a marsh network that reduces flooding in
their own and surrounding communities while fostering
small-scale aquaculture, and spaces to learn and share tra-
ditional crafts using on-site materials such as saw palmetto.
While these cases are limited and not yet fully realized, and
in the case of Isle de Jean Charles currently uncertain due to a
fraught relationship with the state, they suggest the potential
of cultures of climate to produce climate forms that not only
increase resilience for highly vulnerable communities but also
resist and reinvent carbon-hungry sociospatial frameworks.
Carbon forms have no place in the revolutionary adapta-
tion that climate change already requires. As we design new
ways to inhabit a hotter and wetter world, how would we cre-
ate and transform cities not founded on ideologies of growth?
Climate change adaptation is not a solely technical feat, and
we should consider “resilient” architecture, landscape, and
urbanism not only in conventional terms of space and form
but also in terms of processes, politics, and values. As design-
ers, we must critically ask what we mean and who we serve
when we talk about resilience. Architects rarely fund their
own projects, but even in standard practice models we can
avoid becoming unknowing agents of the resilient-growth
machine by understanding how our practice contributes to
carbon societies. More important, designers have the capacity
to provide visions of climate forms that manifest a new culture
of climate. We might reimagine design as an act of creating
objects and spaces, and, as Keller Easterling suggests, consider
how our praxis could be adapted to design the medium, or
frameworks, in which spatial projects are suspended.20 Climate
forms have not yet taken shape, in part because of the lack of
political and cultural shifts by those designing large-scale resil-
ience projects. To inhabit our radically changing climate, new
forms and new worldviews are essential.
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