Article

Urban Studies
2022, Vol. 59(5) 917–936
Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2021
Critical urban theory in the Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Anthropocene DOI: 10.1177/00420980211045523
journals.sagepub.com/home/usj

Stephanie Wakefield
Life University, USA

Abstract
Critical urban thinkers often imagine urbanisation and the Anthropocene as inevitably being compa-
nion processes. But is planetary urbanisation the necessary telos and spatial limit of life in the
Anthropocene? Is urban resilience the final form of urban responses to climate change? Will (or
should) the urban (as either spatial form or process) survive the upending impacts of climate change
or adaptation? Or, if the Anthropocene is a time of deep environmental and epistemological upheaval
without historical precedent, might even more recently created spatial concepts of the planetary
urban condition themselves soon be out of date? This article raises these questions for urban scho-
lars via critical engagement with a proposal to retire Miami – considered climate change ‘ground
zero’ in the US and doomed by rising seas – and repurpose it as fill for ‘The Islands of South Florida’:
a self-sufficient territory of artificial high-rises delinked from global infrastructural networks. This
vision of an ‘urbicidal Anthropocene’, the article argues, suggests that the injunction subtending pla-
netary urbanisation work – to relentlessly question inherited spatial frameworks – has not been
taken far enough. Still needed is Anthropocene critical urban theory, to consider urban forms and
processes emerging via climate change and adaptation, but also how such mutations may point
beyond the theoretical and spatial bounds of the contemporary urban condition itself.

Keywords
agglomeration, Anthropocene, built environment, environment, infrastructure, resilience, sustain-
ability, urbanisation

Corresponding author:
Stephanie Wakefield, Department of Natural Sciences,
Center for Graduate and Undergraduate Studies, Life
University, 1250 Life’s Way, Marietta, GA 30060-2903,
USA.
Email: stephanie.wakefield@life.edu
918 Urban Studies 59(5)

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Received January 2021; accepted August 2021

Introduction
In the last decade, the Anthropocene
(Gaffney and Steffen, 2017) has come to sig-
nify the current epoch of climatic and meta-
physical upheaval, in which past frameworks
no longer suffice to grasp mutating realities
(Tsing, 2016; Wakefield, 2020b). Critical
thinkers have explored the Anthropocene’s
upending of modern ontologies and human/
nature binaries (Cohen et al., 2016; Latour,
2017) and how, rather than made by a gen-
eric ‘human’, the Anthropocene is produced
by capitalist accumulation and control
(Ernstson and Swyngedouw, 2019; Malm
and Hornborg, 2014). Across diverse analy-
ses, the Anthropocene is regularly charac-
terised in terms of urbanisation. Whereas
some, like Moore (2016), tie the emergence
of the Anthropocene (or in his words,
Capitalocene) to exploitations of nature and
people as early as the 16th century, many
others link the epoch’s advent to the indus-
trial urban period (Steffen et al., 2007), iden-
tifying capitalist production of urban spaces
as both Anthropocene driver (Angelo and
Wachsmuth, 2020) and artefact (Elmqvist
et al., 2021; Keil, 2019).
But perhaps even more ubiquitous than
historical and causal analyses are characteri-
sations of the Anthropocene present and
future as an ever-more fully urban age. Here
the Anthropocene is routinely linked to pos-
tulations of the planet’s urbanisation
(Gleeson, 2012), which describes either that
the majority of the world’s population now
lives in cities (Burdett and Sudjic, 2007;
United Nations, 2019) or the integration of
once-distant sites into a planetwide social-
ecological network of processes and technol-
ogies (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Merrifield,
2013). Urban systems are understood as vul-
nerable to and intertwined with floods, heat
and other socionatural catastrophes
(Elmqvist et al., 2021; Silver, 2019). But cit-
ies and urban processes are also viewed as
climate change solutions (Angelo and
Wachsmuth, 2020; Ruddick, 2015). By retro-
fitting cities with a bricolage of resiliency
infrastructures, governments and planners
hope that extreme events and threshold
Wakefield
crossings will be absorbed and governed,
allowing urban spaces to maintain their
basic structures and functions (Braun, 2014;
Pickett et al., 2014; Wakefield and Braun,
2014). In this way, it is almost always ima-
gined, the inexorable development of urbani-
sation and the Anthropocene will remain
necessarily companion processes. In fact, for
geologist Zalasiewicz et al. (2014), cities will
be one of humanity’s longest lasting traces
on the planet, future fossils whose imprint
will remain long after humans. With the
urban envisioned as the inevitable form of
the 21st century, the only question mark, it
seems, is whether urban spaces and processes
will be more or less resilient or equitable,
smart or inclusive.
But is planetary urbanisation the neces-
sary telos and spatial limit of life in the
Anthropocene? Is urban resilience the final
form of urban responses to climate change?
Will (or should) the urban (as either spatial
form or process) actually survive the upend-
ing impacts of climate change or human
adaptive responses? These questions are not
at the front of most critical urban theoretical
agendas, but they are worth taking seriously.
After all, concurrently with projections of
planetary urbanisation as an inevitable con-
dition of the Anthropocene – or Urbicene,
as Swyngedouw (2017) has suggested it
instead be named – in coastal cities like
Miami, Florida, where sea rise-related flood-
ing has already begun, alternative visions of
the urban’s end are now emerging.1 Built on
porous limestone, the densely populated,
low-lying metropolitan area is considered
climate change ground zero in the US,
exposed to increasingly frequent sunny day
flooding and intensifying tropical storms
and extreme rainfall (Wdowinski et al.,
2016). Although Miami is the target of
manifold resilience interventions (Wakefield,
2019), many scientists and planners forecast
that due to projected 21st-century sea rise,
ultimately the city is ‘doomed’ (O’Brien,
919
2018; Wakefield, 2020b). The only way to
continue human life in the region, some of
these planners argue, is to retire Miami and
repurpose it as fill to create a self-sufficient
territory of artificial high-rise zones delinked
from global chains of production and distri-
bution: ‘The Islands of South Florida’ (ISF)
(Alliance of the Southern Triangle [AST]
et al., 2017; Gustafson, 2018).
These visions of the city’s future, this arti-
cle will argue, challenge assumptions of the
inextricability of the Anthropocene and the
urban – and the apparently endless resilience
of the latter – that frequently underlie con-
temporary critical urban thinking. They also
suggest the need for greater attention to how
urban responses to climate change are
producing novel spatial formations and
imaginaries. Instead of using outmoded,
19th-century spatial concepts to understand
21st-century transformations, Neil Brenner
has argued that critical urban thinkers must
‘explode our inherited assumptions regard-
ing the morphologies, territorialisations and
sociospatial dynamics of the urban condi-
tion’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2014: 750) and
open our eyes to mutations in urban form
and process produced by contemporary glo-
bal capitalism. This call for ‘urban theory
for our time’ has been generative, leading
scholars to productively push beyond spatial
assumptions and critically index manifold
‘new urban spaces’ (Brenner, 2019) and
‘vocabularies of urbanisation’ (Schmid et al.,
2018) to capture the urban as a planetary
state of existence (Brenner, 2014; Brenner
and Schmid, 2015; Caldeira, 2017; Rickards
et al., 2016).
While the ‘urban theory for our time’ call
echoes understandings of the Anthropocene
as challenging modern infrastructural and
epistemological frameworks and requiring
experimentation (Wakefield, 2020b), far less
attention has been given to how urban spa-
tial forms and imaginaries – including those
recently identified by planetary urbanisation
920
scholars – are themselves being transformed
by climate change and adaptive responses
(cf. Goh, 2020a). But such engagement is
needed if urban theory is to be truly contem-
porary, for, as Goh (2020b: 3) asks, ‘if cli-
mate change is the defining challenge of the
moment, how is it not indelibly transforming
our core thinking of the urban?’ This is not
to say that critical studies of urban climate
adaptation are lacking. On the contrary,
critical interrogation of urban resilience, for
example, abounds, with much attention on
how it extends and is intertwined with socio-
economic inequality (Adger et al., 2020;
Long and Rice, 2019; Meerow and Newell,
2019), racialised exclusion (Bonds, 2018;
Grove et al., 2020), neoliberalism (While
and Whitehead, 2013) and governmentality
(Braun, 2014; Derickson, 2018b; Wakefield
and Braun, 2014). Yet what remains unques-
tioned across diverse critical analyses of
urban resilience is that the basic spatial form
of cities and urban processes will remain
(more or less resiliently) as the
Anthropocene progresses. As in planetary
urbanisation work, assumed is the continu-
ing existence and expansion of the urban (all
that are needed, presumably, are better ways
of organising or managing it).
But if the Anthropocene is indeed a time
of deep uncertainty with no historical prece-
dent, might it be that even more recently
‘inherited cognitive maps’ (Brenner, 2013:
95) of the planetary urban condition are
themselves soon to be out of date, scrambled
by the climate change and adaptative strate-
gies that the epoch will prompt? And rather
than a seemingly endless expanse of resilient
cities and urban processes, might the
Anthropocene’s environmental and human
transformations produce something else?
Overview
Engaging critical work on urban ecological
security, urban resilience and planetary
Urban Studies 59(5)
urbanisation, this article analyses the ISF
proposal and the challenges it poses to these
literatures’ often-unquestioned visions of the
Anthropocene as a resilient urban age.
Instead of this now-standard future imagin-
ary, ISF, I show, envisions an alternative
trajectory of an urbicidal Anthropocene. I
conceptualise two forms of Anthropocene
urbicide: killing an already-doomed urban
agglomeration – the end of the resilient city
– and breaking from planetary urbanisa-
tion’s infrastructural networks.
Documenting this new urbicidal vision is
important and novel in its own right. While
there is a growing literature on urban resili-
ence in Miami (Grove et al., 2020;
Wakefield, 2019), little to no critical work
has examined designs for after resilience has
been exhausted. But, for the purposes of this
article, my exploration of ISF is primarily
intended to raise challenges and questions
for critical urban theorists working on cli-
mate change, urban resilience and planetary
urbanisation. Contributing to thinking on
the broader problematic of ‘urban concepts
under stress’ (Rickards et al., 2016), my aim
is to push the call for abandoning inherited
frameworks and pursuing relentless theoreti-
cal experimentation much further. Thus I
conclude by reflecting on the need for
Anthropocene critical urban theory, able to
comprehend urban forms and processes
emerging at the intersection of climate
change and adaptation, as well as how these
mutations may point beyond the theoretical
and spatial bounds of the contemporary
urban condition itself.
Two disclaimers: first, Miami’s situation –
on a porous limestone foundation, unable to
stay dry via sea walls – is unique. Caution
should be taken in extrapolating develop-
ments there to all coastal cities. Nevertheless,
Miami is seen by powerful institutions as a
climate change test lab (Wakefield, 2019),
and developments there will undoubtedly
influence other urban imaginaries and
Wakefield
practices to some degree. Second, I am not
suggesting that an urbicidal Anthropocene
‘age’ would replace urban resilience or plane-
tary urbanisation (one totality for another).
Rather, my claim is that an urbicidal imagin-
ary is ascendant, at least in Miami, not only
in films and art where urban apocalypse is
common, but in what policymakers and
planners envision as pragmatic responses to
widespread forecasts of the city’s inevitable
submergence. However specific and hypothe-
tical, my argument is that this proposal
raises challenges for urban thinkers focused
on the urban–Anthropocene nexus that are
worth considering seriously, while under-
standing urbicide as only one of many possi-
ble futures.
Urban resilience forever?
The Miami metropolitan area is considered
climate change ground zero in the US. Built
on porous karst limestone and extremely
low-lying, Miami is already experiencing
sea-level rise effects, including increasingly
frequent sunny day saltwater flooding
(Spanger-Siegfried et al., 2014; Wdowinski
et al., 2016) and septic tank failure from ris-
ing water tables (Miami Dade County,
2020). The densely developed region, con-
taining the world’s highest value of assets
exposed to sea rise (Nicholls et al., 2008),
also faces rising temperatures, and flooding
related to intensifying tropical storms and
heavy rainfall events in major commercial
districts (Urban Land Institute [ULI], 2018).
To secure Miami and its real estate mar-
ket and government revenues, planners,
scientists and engineers have enrolled the city
as a resiliency ‘living laboratory’ (Wakefield,
2019; on urban climate labs, see Bulkeley
et al., 2019; Evans, 2016). Miami Beach’s
US$500 million resiliency infrastructure pro-
gramme, ‘Rising Above’, includes a fleet of
new industrial pumps, elevated streets and
seawalls to prepare the city for 30–50 years
921
of sea rise, coastal flooding and king tides
(ULI, 2018). The City of Miami, City of
Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County have
each created Chief Resilience Officer posi-
tions to oversee municipal resilience plan-
ning. Their Greater Miami and the Beaches
partnership recently released Resilient305, a
strategy plan for fielding increasingly fre-
quent shocks and stressors, from sea rise and
hurricanes to socioeconomic inequality and
traffic jams (Greater Miami and the Beaches
[GMB], 2019). Attempts are also underway
to restore Everglades freshwater flows to
push back saltwater intrusion into the urban
drinking water supply (Wakefield et al.,
2021). At the community scale, the South
Florida Disaster Resilience Initiative seeks
to increase the capacities of the city’s poor
and vulnerable to prepare for and recover
from extreme events (Wakefield, 2020b).
While designed within the city’s specific
spatio-temporal conjuncture (Sheppard
et al., 2015) – which in this case is urban-
economic-geological – Miami’s resiliency
strategies exemplify the broader resilient cit-
ies paradigm that now dominates urban
planning (Beilin and Wilkinson, 2015;
Kaika, 2017; Meerow et al., 2016). Part of
the problematising of cities as solutions
(Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020), resilience is
not an apolitical techno-managerial project,
but rather a social-ecological systems-based
mode of governing populations and environ-
ments in the Anthropocene (Evans and
Reid, 2014; Wakefield and Braun, 2014)
which combines ecological adaptive manage-
ment with critical infrastructure protection
(Coaffee and Lee, 2016) to build cities’ capa-
cities to field, absorb and govern crises so as
to maintain systems identity (Folke, 2016;
Wakefield, 2020a). Not a homogeneous
‘thing’ (Anderson, 2015; Beilin and
Wilkinson, 2015), urban resilience assembles
heterogeneous tactics and place-specific
designs (Tozzi, 2021; Wakefield and Braun,
2014) and draws selectively on diverse
922
understandings of resilience in fields like
psychology and ecology (Neocleous, 2013).
Municipal resilience projects have been
extensively criticised by scholars for failing
to include marginalised communities (Grove
et al., 2020) or issues like mental health
(Camponeschi, 2020). But in urban contexts
and beyond, resilience has proven extremely
resilient itself due to planners’ and govern-
ments’ ability to incorporate critiques and
reinvent resilience as the most appropriate
management approach for the
Anthropocene (Wakefield et al., 2021).
As envisioned by proponents and critics
alike, as the ‘deus ex machina’ of the
Anthropocene, as geographer Derickson
(2018b: 426) puts it, the resilient city is a city
that, by both allowing and administering
ecological catastrophe, can still be saved.
Imagined across urban resilience initiatives
is a future city that, although inundated by
seas and storms, remains both viable and
governable. In Miami, water will come, but
through grey, green and social infrastruc-
tures added incrementally over time
(Obeysekera et al., 2020), its impact can be
anticipated and managed. Existing urban
infrastructure and terrain will be trans-
formed, retrofitted or supplemented, but
broader system parameters will be main-
tained amidst turbulence. Circulation of cap-
ital, tourism and investment will be secured,
by buffering the catastrophic effects these
structures create. Through a bricolage of
modular, integrated green and grey and
‘social’ infrastructures able to absorb and
field the end and even gain from extreme
events – for example, improving urban resi-
dents’ subjective well-being (Adger et al.,
2020) or incorporating marginalised commu-
nities (Grove et al., 2020) – the global ‘city
on the edge’ (Portes and Stepick, 1993) will
ward off the end and even thrive while seas
rise up through its foundations and waves
crash against its shores.
Urban Studies 59(5)
In the resilient imaginary, large-scale eco-
logical and technical infrastructures work
together with situated local practices and
know-how of the poor and vulnerable – now
termed critical ‘social infrastructure’ –
together constituting an eco-cybernetic,
adaptive urban network (Wakefield, 2020a).
This revised spatial-governmental form is
seen as promising a future urban immunised
from extreme press and pulse events, both
ecological and social (Adams, 2014). Rather
than 20th-century visions of order, the resili-
ent city will be a ‘crisis city’ (Gotham and
Greenberg, 2015), perpetually vulnerable to
compound risks (because resilient infrastruc-
tures do not replace but supplement existing
industrial infrastructures (Wakefield and
Braun, 2019)). But it is still a governable,
saveable city. With crisis as a constitutive
backdrop, resilient infrastructures enable cit-
ies like Miami to remain financially and
physically viable, subtended by and inter-
linked with the critical flows of capital, peo-
ple, commodities that constitute neoliberal
planetary urbanisation. In resilient urban-
ism, what is seen as still possible is the con-
tinued reproduction of the city’s basic social,
economic and geographical parameters
amidst ecological catastrophe. This future
vision is aptly summed up in the name of
Miami’s US$400 million resiliency infra-
structure bond: ‘Miami Forever’.
An urbicidal Anthropocene
Whether loved by practitioners or hated by
critics, resilience is often portrayed as the
horizon and ne plus ultra of urban life in the
Anthropocene, beyond which little else is
discussed or envisioned. Likewise, ‘climate
change’, Angelo and Wachsmuth (2020:
2211) claim in a recent Urban Studies special
issue, ‘has (thus far) offered no obvious ‘‘less
city’’ solution’. But Anthropocene crises
have begun fraying the edges of this
Wakefield
imaginary. In the same special issue, Keil
(2020: 2365) asks:
As we scramble to stay on top of yet the next
record hurricane or typhoon hurling them-
selves against coastal mangroves or misplaced
developments on shore, we have arrived in an
era of permanent catastrophe . In this situa-
tion, as once again even the most sophisticated
flood control systems fail . we ask ourselves
whether cities . are up to the task that lies
ahead.
For some Miami planners and scientists, the
answer is no. For them, current resiliency
efforts will be insufficient to manage the
region’s projected sea rise: 10–17 inches by
2040; 21–54 inches by 2070; 40–136 inches
by 2120 (Compact, 2019: 4). According to
former Miami Beach chief engineer Bruce
Mowry, who oversaw many resilience infra-
structure projects discussed above, whether
or not carbon emissions are reduced today,
coastal areas remain vulnerable. Miami
Beach’s resiliency infrastructures are only
designed for the next 30–40 years. After
that, as University of Miami geologist
Harold Wanless sees it, the city is ‘doomed’
(Wakefield, 2020b). FIU geochemist Henry
Briceño agrees: Miami is ‘the future
Atlantis’ (O’Brien, 2018). Drawing on these
assessments, in an essay originally titled
‘Goodbye, Miami’, Goodell (2013) envi-
sioned the city’s 21st-century fate.
Resilience’s hubris (Wakefield et al., 2021)
becomes clear. Saltwater contaminates
drinking water supply. Investors and tourists
leave. Roads become undrivable at high
tides. Banks stop issuing mortgages. By
2100, ‘Rising sea levels will turn the nation’s
urban fantasyland into an American
Atlantis . a popular snorkeling spot where
people could swim with sharks and sea tur-
tles and explore the wreckage of a great
American city’ (Goodell, 2013). Such fore-
casts of urban doom are based largely on
Miami’s geology. Built on porous limestone,
923
made of marine deposits accumulated from
the remains of sea creatures over millions of
years when the area was underwater, the city
faces sea rise flooding not only along coasts
but also from water coming up through its
foundation. During annual king tides, sea
water rises through street drains and streets,
flooding roadways and intersections.
Whereas Dutch cities use dykes to mitigate
flooding or Manhattan might be salvaged
using massive Bjarke Ingels-designed sea
barriers, Miami’s permeable foundation
means flooding advances even with walls.
As summed up by former Speaker of the
Florida House of Representatives and pro-
gram director of the Institute of
Environment at Florida International
University, Tom Gustafson (2018):
Given current South Florida elevations,
GHGs already in the atmosphere, the likely
acceleration of such GHG emissions for the
next twenty years and more, and expected sea
level rise feedback mechanisms, there is little
likelihood that South Florida, as we know it
today, [will be] habitable by the year 2100
AD.
Gustafson, a Greta Thunberg supporter and
impassioned climate action advocate, has
responded to Florida’s refusal to act on cli-
mate change, suggesting, ‘I have a solution
for that. We need to all march up to the capi-
tal in Tallahassee and burn the fucker down.
That’s the only way we’re gonna save South
Florida’ (Goodell, 2013: 103). Like many
designers engaging Miami (e.g. Stein, 2014),
Gustafson argues that more dramatic trans-
formations will be necessary to maintain
conditions for human habitation in the
region over coming decades. In academic
conferences, planning workshops and infor-
mal conversations, he and other scientists
foresee the necessity of bulldozing old build-
ings and physically transforming the city into
an infrastructurally linked, self-sufficient
zone of high grounds, connected like the
924
Florida Keys by new elevated bridges (AST
et al., 2017; Goodell, 2021; Gustafson,
2018). As envisioned by Gustafson, this
idea’s most vocal promoter, building the
‘Islands of South Florida’ (ISF) will require
converting nearly all of Miami’s currently
developed land into fill, which will be used
to create a series of new elevated islands. On
the islands will be luxury high-rise buildings,
with space allocated for a service workforce.
The rest of the South Florida population will
be migrated out via managed retreat. The
artificial islands, in Gustafson’s vision, will
be based in localised food and materials pro-
duction and water-based lifestyles.
This vision suggests glimpses of a new
paradigm of Anthropocene coastal adapta-
tion that, while related to urban resilience,
must be distinguished from it. Resilience
remodulates existing urban geographies and
built environments to secure present social,
economic and geographical conditions.
While urban resilience departs in significant
ways from modern engineering-based plan-
ning, imagining instead an interconnected
bricolage of situated social, technical and
ecological infrastructures, it is still funda-
mentally modern because it maintains hope
that the city can (and should) be saved
(Chandler, 2019). Through an interlaced,
layered suite of soft and hard infrastructures
to field and absorb disaster events – man-
grove buffers, elevated roads, pumps, sea
walls, adaptive communities – existing urban
geographies remain viable and governable.
ISF, however, suggests the impossibility
of this resiliency vision. In its future imagin-
ary, the existing urban formation is por-
trayed as doomed, destined to be swallowed
by the century’s rising seas. Challenging
hegemonic assertions that there is ‘no other
way’ but to become resilient (Rockefeller
Foundation, 2016) and the idea, central to
resilience, that systems can endure and
absorb neoliberalism’s disasters (Evans and
Urban Studies 59(5)
Reid, 2014), adapting and surviving while
perpetually remaining vulnerable, ISF fore-
sees the impossibility of making the existing
urban resilient. Accordingly, rather than ret-
rofitted, it must be pre-emptively destroyed.
Envisioned here is not elevating Miami – as
engineer Mowry puts it, ‘defend[ing] against
the water at the present interface of the
ocean to the land’ (AST et al., 2017) – rais-
ing roads and eventually a whole city as in
Miami Beach’s resilience efforts (Wakefield,
2019). Echoing the ‘anticipatory ruination’
of rural coastal life in Bangladesh by inter-
national financial institutions in the name of
climate adaptation (Paprocki, 2019, 2020),
albeit on a whole city scale, ISF instead
envisions the necessity of pulverising the cur-
rent city in order to use its substrate as fill
for a new geography.
Thus, instead of urban resilience, we have
an anticipatory urbicide. The military tactic
of destroying (‘killing’) cities, and frequently
associated with counterinsurgency, urbicide
has long been a strategy for attacking an
insurgent force’s ‘urban foundations’
(Graham, 2011: 226) and has been used to
describe the American military’s walling off
towns and urban districts in Iraq or the
Israeli Defense Forces’ bulldozing of Jenin
camps (Bleibleh et al., 2019; Graham, 2011;
Weizman, 2007). ISF, however, envisions
Anthropocene urbicide.
In ISF, Miami’s physical ground appears
as a pragmatic and existential problem, and
solution: source of urban vulnerability to
sea rise and raw material for new territory.
This physical ground was itself recently engi-
neered. Miami was built, largely by African
American labourers, on drained swampland.
Likewise, the current topography of Miami
Beach, a thin barrier island in the late 19th
century, was created in the early 20th cen-
tury as part of a real estate scheme by entre-
preneur Carl Fisher. Under Fisher – who
prohibited Jews and African Americans
Wakefield
from renting, buying or staying in his Miami
Beach properties (Carson, 1955) – workers,
elephants and mules cleared the island’s
dense mangrove swamps and filled wetlands.
Millions of cubic yards of sand dredged
from adjacent Biscayne Bay and Everglades
soil were added atop existing limestone
foundation (Mohr, 2015) and arranged into
level terrain 3–5 feet above sea level. Miami
Beach’s grid of streets, pavements and con-
dos was overlaid on this new foundation,
built with rock brought in by barge from
inland mines, providing terrain for Fisher’s
racially restricted new industrial money
crowd (Carson, 1955).
Carrying elements of this approach for-
ward into the Anthropocene (while deeming
the city it produced a failure), in Gustafson’s
vision, government must obtain 100% of the
city’s developed land to use as fill. This
would be done via multiple methods. Some
land must be condemned. A smaller percent-
age, he argues, can be sold to private develo-
pers and subsequently bought out. As in the
limestone mining operations across Florida,
conceivably this would involve clearing
earthen and built materials that would not
be used. Iconic palm trees would be
replanted or mulched. Historic art deco
hotels would be trucked out, preserved or
demolished. Once it was cleared, excavators
would remove soft sandy top layers.
Explosive dynamite would break up hard
areas of limestone. Both would be crushed
into a uniform size suitable for use as fill.
As in Paprocki’s (2019) discussion of out-
migration from Bangladesh’s rural southern
coast to Kolkata’s peri-urban slums, this
envisioned adaptation strategy does not
merely respond to ‘inevitable’ environmental
crisis but traces out the ‘anticipatory ruina-
tion’ of infrastructures and space through
which communities in regions ‘enframed’ as
climate change hotspots sustain themselves.
925
Anthropocene islandisation
As with traditional understandings of urbi-
cide, ISF envisions demolition of an existing
urban form – its infrastructure and geogra-
phy – and its replacement with one chosen
by the demolishing force. In Iraqi cities, for
example, the American military sought to
install a liberal regime of life and control.
And urbicide is not only linked to wartime
but also peacetime efforts by neoliberal
elites, especially in the Global South, to
rebrand as global cities by bulldozing slums,
evicting dwellers and building financially
attractive highways, high rises and stadiums
(Graham, 2011: 84). In a similar but more
existential-pragmatic vein, ISF envisions
converting urban ground into a new spatial
formation: an aqua-urban island territory.
As critical urban thinkers, how might we
understand this imagined production of a
new island territory? Certainly, we could
understand the Islands of South Florida via
the planetary urbanisation rubric (Brenner,
2014). Though underexamined in planetary
urbanisation literature, urban climate adap-
tation is already generating its own novel
urban sites and processes in Miami and else-
where. These Anthropocene urban forms,
like Miami Beach’s elevated roadways
(Wakefield, 2019), find good company
alongside New York’s experimental oyster
infrastructure (Wakefield, 2020c) and
Rotterdam–New York–Jakarta’s global-
urban climate adaptation network (Goh,
2020a). ISF too could be read as a vision of
a novel territorial formation and rescaling
generated by the endless dialectic of planet-
ary urbanisation and creative destruction.
Read thus, ISF reinforces visions of a future
in which planetary urbanisation’s ‘Neo-
Haussmanisation’ (Merrifield, 2013) and
process of implosion–explosion (Brenner,
2014) now include dismantling entire cities.
In this reading, the imagined physical
926
destruction of the city – and the homes, nat-
ures and memories in it – and transubstan-
tiation into fill appears as a dramatic ‘spatial
fix’ to manage crises and maintain the exist-
ing social-economic order (Swyngedouw,
2017).2
Reading ISF as an (imagined) instance of
planetary urbanisation is important, but
there are other interpretations possible.
Significantly, ISF is envisioned not as a mere
continuation of planetary urbanisation but
is instead articulated in attempted opposi-
tion to the historical-geographical relational-
ity it entails. At core, planetary urbanisation
is a conceptualisation of unbounded infra-
structural interconnection, integration and
relationality, meant to capture how contem-
porary capitalist transformations operatio-
nalise heterogeneous, distant sites to support
agglomerations of urban life with energy,
food, water and other resources (Ghosh and
Meer, 2021). Planetary urbanisation: the
linking via roads, pipelines, supply chains,
cables and distribution routes of all social
and ecological relations into an ever-thicken-
ing, uneven and variegated worldwide infra-
structural fabric (Arboleda, 2020; Brenner,
2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2014, 2015;
Merrifield, 2013; Rickards et al., 2016). Thus
for planetary urbanisation theorists and
many urban geographers too, understanding
today’s urban condition requires moving
beyond ‘obsolete’ (Brenner and Schmid,
2014: 750) bounded and binarist analytics
which view the urban as an ‘enclosed terri-
torial arena’ (Brenner, 2013: 100), and
towards relational approaches more appro-
priate to 21st-century realities (Amin and
Thrift, 2002; Braun, 2005).
Relational analytics are obviously appro-
priate for mapping neoliberal globalisation’s
infrastructures, crises and governmental
modalities. But is interconnected planetary
urbanisation actually the ‘telos’ and ‘final
frontier’ (Merrifield, 2013: 6) of life in the
Anthropocene? ISF, I argue, suggests a
Urban Studies 59(5)
glimpse of other nascent possibilities.
Instead of further infrastructural integration
– in which the whole Earth is endlessly con-
nected – ISF envisions not only dismantling
existing urban ground, but also delinking
from global infrastructural networks and
interdependencies. Here Graham’s (2005)
‘switching cities off’ – military targeting of
critical urban infrastructures – takes on new
meaning. For Gustafson, ISF must redesign
and localise all of the infrastructures that
subtend Miami life. As he explained during
the beginning weeks of the COVID-19 pan-
demic, ‘We have to cut all global supply
chains. See Coronavirus? The future requires
isolationism’ (personal communication,
March 2020). Here the island appears as a
key Anthropocene site, albeit not evoking
relationality (Chandler and Pugh, 2020) but
detachment (Wakefield, 2021). Among other
infrastructural transformations, the Islands
will ‘[g]row locally most or all our food;
manufacture locally most or all our goods
and building materials in daily use; and,
secure the raw materials/durable goods we
might need’ (Gustafson, 2018). In this
‘Regional Refuge’, production is localised,
something residents participate in themselves
via ‘tabletop design and manufacturing
tools’ (Gustafson, personal communication,
March 2020). Buffered by mangrove forests
and saltwater resistant vegetation, the envi-
sioned island territory features extreme
storm-resistant architecture to withstand the
region’s expected hammering rain, storm
surge and powerful winds. Power is gener-
ated through wind and solar technologies
supplemented by fourth-generation nuclear.
The Islands maintain an electronic ‘Library
of Alexander’ and seed bank of crops suited
to the region’s long-term, climate change-
altered growing conditions. While relocalised
in terms of production and distribution, the
Islands are interconnected regionally in
terms of security infrastructure, Gustafson
envisions, acting as a frontline US military
Wakefield
bulwark against ‘pirates of the Caribbean’,
which he sees as arising with the future fail-
ure of island states. Thus, some of the
Islands host military bases, connected by
massive bridges built for smart electric vehi-
cles and automated trucks to move supplies
and people between islands.
Here is a second core vision of
Anthropocene urbicide: strategically cutting
key infrastructural links that defined urbani-
sation at the 21st century’s dawn, in order to
survive its twilight. In identifying global
infrastructural connectivity as a key problem
of the Anthropocene, and infrastructural
network delinking as a spatial-
infrastructural strategy for inhabiting it, ISF
is not alone. The 20th century saw the pro-
gressive building of transportation routes to
move commodities from far-flung produc-
tion sites to points of consumption, pipelines
to move oil and gas from distant extraction
sites, massive energy grids connecting
regions. But in the Anthropocene, liberal
societies’ dependence on ‘vital’ infrastructure
systems is increasingly seen as a vulnerability
(Collier and Lakoff, 2008), witnessed for
example in urban supply chain interruptions
and fuel shortages caused by recent hurri-
canes (Wakefield, 2020a). Resilience and
critical infrastructure protection strategies
respond to these crises by attempting to
secure existing networks. In contrast, islan-
disation is already emerging as an
Anthropocene strategy used by diverse
actors to secure themselves from disasters,
populations or infrastructural networks
deemed harmful to them by cutting links
(Wakefield, 2021) (while often selectively
maintaining other networked connections
(Hodson and Marvin, 2010)). Here, think
lavish doomsday bunkers (South, 2019);
floating yachts and eco-districts (Wakefield,
2021); ‘interiorised’, controlled ‘microcli-
mates’ embedded within cities (Lockhart
and Marvin, 2020); or ‘future cities’ like Eko
Atlantic City, a corporation and bank-
927
funded multi-billion-dollar walled private
luxury ‘resilient’ city development off the
coast of Lagos, Nigeria, with its own auton-
omous power, water, security and sea wall
(Ajibade, 2017). Islandising has been on the
rise during COVID-19 as well, for example
with controversial border closures around
actual geographic islands like New Zealand
figuring largely in debates around the ethics
and efficacy of pandemic management.
The brutal inequalities and exclusions of
‘lifeboat cities’ (Gleeson, 2012) are obvious,
and scholars have been criticising the injus-
tices of ‘urban ecological security’ enclaves
for over a decade (Hodson and Marvin,
2010) – though these latter were usually con-
centrated on fortifying existing cities like
London, not demolishing them. But if we
focus less on the envisioned spatial form of
ISF and instead on the delinking process
perceived as key to it, we see that ISF’s
infrastructural relocalisations imagine nei-
ther immunising current urban forms or
processes (Adams, 2014), nor fortifying
existing cities (Hodson and Marvin, 2010),
nor just creating ‘new’ or ‘future’ elite
enclave cities as if on a tabula rasa (Ajibade,
2017; Moser, 2020), but cutting key infra-
structural links to create a new geographical
form in opposition to planetary urbanisation
itself. This is a vision of building an ‘outside’
to planetary urbanisation as a strategic
necessity for surviving the Anthropocene.
Clearly planetary urbanisation – the concept
or historical socioeconomic formation – has
never encompassed or ‘mastered’ all views
or spaces (Derickson, 2018a; Jazeel, 2018;
Oswin, 2018). But ‘outside’ here does not
refer to spaces or views that planetary urba-
nisation as totalising theory occludes, nor is
it meant to offer ‘difference’ as a ‘corrective’
to ‘abstraction’ (Angelo and Goh, 2021: 4).
Instead, approached from a spatiotemporal
conjunctural perspective (Sheppard et al.,
2015), islandisation appears as an histori-
cally specific spatial strategy envisioned
928
from within the historical formation known
as planetary urbanisation, via attempts to
break from the networks and flows that con-
stitute and maintain it. This is a specifically
Anthropocenic vision arising in ‘pragmatic’
response to perceived material ‘problems’
(Barnett and Bridge, 2016) (sea rise and
urban vulnerability).
It is not hard to see this vision’s potential
dark trajectories given the histories of top-
down technocratic projects (Scott, 1998) and
dispossession and destruction central to
planned migration and urbicide. Read as an
extension of these lineages – and perhaps a
‘migration’ of the ‘enclaving’ spatial imagin-
ary (Nielsen et al., 2021) into Miami’s unique
climate change context – Anthropocene urbi-
cide and attendant reterritorialisations
would suggest a glimpse of potential recali-
brations to current governmental formations
that may emerge as liberal regimes seek to
maintain themselves amidst the century’s
shocks and stresses (including climate migra-
tion, which Hurricane Maria has already set
in motion from Puerto Rico to South
Florida (Hinojosa et al., 2018)). Far from
utopian floating cities, this brings to mind
dystopian visions of a global ‘climate apart-
heid’ regime, which Rice et al. (2021) argue
is already emerging via selective infrastruc-
tural recalibrations. On one side, the ‘future
architecture of the elite . promis[ing] ely-
sian sanctuaries . Disneyesque escapes
from the realities of the state of the planet’
(South, 2019: 68), the world’s richest 1% for-
tified against undesirable environmental and
human surrounds; on the other, the rest of
the world subject to ecological breakdown,
dwindling resources and migration (Brisman
et al., 2018).
This dark reading can of course be
reversed. After all, delinking is not inherently
regressive. Less overdetermined (and less
resourced) efforts by poor and working-class
people to build local infrastructures and
autonomy also abound (Wakefield, 2020b,
Urban Studies 59(5)
2021). Notably in this vein, ISF draws on
Gustafson’s ongoing work with EcoTech
Visions Foundation, a Miami-based ‘disrup-
tion’, ‘ecopreneurship’, non-profit focused
on democratic, free dissemination of green
manufacturing and tech skills to margina-
lised communities via maker and incubator
spaces (EcoTech Visions Foundation
[ETVF], 2018). Considering that urbanisa-
tion’s interlinking of commodity and infra-
structural flows into a single, continuous
web – the ‘metropolis’ (Gordillo, 2019) – is
also a technology of proletarianisation
(Brenner, 2014) and control (Adams, 2019),
could an islandised territory delinked from
global networks also be democratic or eman-
cipatory, a utopian attempt to escape manu-
factured vulnerability and build community
autonomy via local production, sustainable
energy and water-based lifeways?
Ultimately, the social-ecological relation-
ship between islandisation and the broader
urbanised, neoliberal planet remains to be
explored and the technopolitical questions
this vision raises – would ISF be another
Eko Atlantic City? A delinked but demo-
cratic Anthropocene refuge by/for the
region’s diverse masses? Or something else
entirely? Good or bad, would its attempted
outside even be possible? – cannot be
answered hypothetically.
What we can, however, say about ISF is
that its urbicidal imaginaries suggest a key
point for urban scholars, which is that pla-
netary urbanisation’s foundational injunc-
tion – to relentlessly question inherited
spatial concepts – has not been taken far
enough. Planetary urbanisation and rela-
tional entanglement analytics may describe
existing formations, but forecasts of their
continuing infinitely (whether linearly or
dialectically via implosion/explosion)
towards ever greater enmeshment may be
premature. As climate change progresses
and urban adaptive responses mutate in
kind, perhaps the unique late 20th- and early
Wakefield
21st-century formation known as planetary
urbanisation (Ghosh and Meer, 2021) –
itself superseding 19th- and early 20th-cen-
tury spatial models – will splinter into other
Anthropocene sites. Clearly, they will not
resemble past or present spaces. The polis,
medieval walled cities, 19th-century indus-
trial cities: each had their own historically
unique spatial characteristics, subjectivities,
modes of governance and relations with
nature. So too, Anthropocene spaces.
Located as it is at the frontlines of sea rise
and branded as an experimental adaptation
model for cities worldwide, perhaps Miami
offers an image of the future: Miami, capital
of the Anthropocene, like Los Angeles was
for some urban theorists a trendsetter mark-
ing out a post-Fordist trajectory subse-
quently followed by cities globally (Soja and
Scott, 1986)? Or, given Miami’s unique geol-
ogy and the fragmenting, ‘pluriversal’ (Law,
2015) rather than homogeneous, nature of
life in the Anthropocene (Latour, 2017), per-
haps Miami is more accurately auditioning
one potential urbicidal pathway. Instead of
the image of Earth viewed from space, criss-
crossed by interlinked commodity and
industrial resource networks, here the para-
digmatic visual would be those lit-up net-
works blinking out, as they are severed and
parts of the world go island.
Conclusion
For geographer Knuth (2020), the ‘death’
of the city is a trope endemic to modern
urban regimes. Austerity and deindustriali-
sation, ghettoisation, gentrification and tour-
istification target and destroy urban
geographies (Gotham and Greenberg, 2015;
Sugrue, 2005). From creative destruction to
‘ruination-as-usual’, Knuth describes capital-
ist urban regimes’ propensity for devaluation
and ruination in terms of Marx’s classic for-
mulation: ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
‘Eschatological evocation[s] of urban
929
apocalypse’ (Gandy, 2005: 38) too are as
old as the city itself. But the Anthropocene
is also producing distinct visions of the
urban’s end, post-resilience adaptation
imaginaries that are novel both for Miami
and cities more generally. In the past as in
resilient urban future visions today, even if
technocrats bulldozed neighbourhoods or
narcotics trade-driven violence prompted
elite anxieties, the city itself – its basic
structures and identity – persisted, despite
being radically transformed or disrupted.
But in Miami, a new urbicidal future is
being imagined. Rather than secure exist-
ing land formations and urban boundaries
against sea rise as resilience approaches seek
to do, this vision promotes pre-emptive
destruction of an iconic-but-seen-as-doomed
modern urban form. Pushing already-
existing islandisation and enclaving imagin-
aries to extreme, here Anthropocene urbicide
also envisions an attendant break from the
globally networked energy and production
infrastructures that constitute planetary
urbanisation. This imagined spatial territory
is not intended to serve urban centres else-
where but to sustain itself.
In exploring the ISF proposal, my aim
has been to document a new, as-yet-
unanalysed urban imaginary emerging in
Miami in response to the perceived hard lim-
its of climate change, but also, in doing so,
to highlight and reconsider taken-for-
granted assumptions in urban scholarship
regarding the apparently endless resilience of
urban space in the Anthropocene (an
assumption which, I argue, weakens efforts
to create an ‘urban theory for our time’).
My argument is that, though hypothetical –
and by no means dominant – ISF’s urbicidal
vision raises important questions for urban
theorists focused on planetary urbanisation,
urban resilience and climate change. Most
obviously, it suggests the possibility that the
‘‘‘lifetime’’ of today’s urban fabrics and met-
ropolitan forms’, as Knuth puts it, may be
930
more ephemeral than accounts of the
Anthropocene and planetary urbanisation
imagine. The 21st century’s changing envir-
onments and technopolitical adaptive
responses may well lead to destruction of
seemingly unquestionable spatial forms like
the urban or globally networked urbanisa-
tion, and birth new, previously unimagined
geographies. As a possible trajectory along-
side or in conflict with urban resilience, an
urbicidal Anthropocene might encompass
the brutal destructive agency of nonhuman
forces. Already, record heat has buckled
roads in the north-western USA and melting
permafrost in northern Russian cities has
crumbled buildings (Luhn, 2016). Very
recently, the potential becoming-unviable of
urban ground has painfully come to the fore
in Miami, with media, residents and engi-
neers investigating the possible role of sea
rise and saltwater corrosion (alongside
shoddy construction, structural defects and
misleading government assurances) in the
tragic Champlain Tower South condo col-
lapse in June 2021. A reproblematising is
already underway of the city’s older build-
ings, with several now declared unsafe and
evacuated, potentially paving the way for
developer demolitions (Goodell, 2021;
Matthews, 2021). Or, Anthropocene urbi-
cide might also issue from human agents dis-
mantling ‘already-obsolete’ (Monnin, 2021)
modern forms as fundamental as the urban
itself, to use them as raw materials for new
spatial typologies. Such developments would
be multiple in form. But ISF suggests that at
least one potential end of the urban
might be tied to attempted delinking from
infrastructural networks, rather than the
eco-cybernetic interlinking envisioned by
theorisations of planetary urbanisation and
urban resilience alike.
The end of the city explored in this article
is, at present, just a thought experiment.
Urban Studies 59(5)
Nevertheless, allowing it to momentarily sus-
pend the sense of inevitability that surrounds
urbanisation in the Anthropocene opens
thought to the possibility that the resilient
urban – meaning both ‘cities’ and current
historical-political globally integrated net-
works – may not be the only fate of human
life in the Anthropocene. In this opening,
many questions become important for criti-
cal urban theory. What 21st-century spatial
forms and processes may emerge, not just
within urbanisation, but to disrupt, destroy
or replace urbanisation? What new modes of
government and forms of life might such
geographies produce? Is it possible to ima-
gine desirable modes of deconstruction and
new spatial forms beyond or against current
urban structures, rather than leaving these
to always emerge reactively as environmen-
tal adaptations or top-down governmental
interventions?
Addressing these kinds of questions
requires a new research agenda:
Anthropocene critical urban theory.
Anthropocene critical urban theory needs to
engage more closely with the spatial imagin-
aries, strategies and emergent forms of cli-
mate change adaptation. Failure to do so
risks reproducing the problem of relying on
inherited spatial concepts – even newer ones
like planetary urbanisation or responses to
urban concepts ‘under stress’ (Rickards
et al., 2016) – and missing mutations climate
responses may produce, including nascent
spaces and processes that push beyond cur-
rently dominant paradigms of urban resili-
ence and planetary urbanisation. Just as
there is a need for conceptual, methodologi-
cal and practical experimentation to let go
of ‘inherited cognitive maps of the urban
condition’ (Brenner, 2013: 95), there is also
a need to maintain an experimental open-
ness to the possibility that urbanisation and
urban resilience are not the only condition
Wakefield
of life in the Anthropocene. To understand
the Anthropocene’s seismic mutations, both
human and nature-induced, deductive analy-
sis based on conceptual frameworks from
the 20th and early 21st century will likely be
inadequate on its own. Fresh concepts will
be needed to grasp novel spatial forms and
strategies produced at the historically unpre-
cedented intersections of urbanisation, cli-
mate change and adaptation.
Not limited to tracing elite experimenta-
tion, Anthropocene critical urban theory
can also apply this mindset to considerations
of how poor and working-class urban dwell-
ers intervene in, resist or reappropriate these
mutations rather than being subject to them.
As noted above, it is easy to view the ima-
ginaries explored in this article as destined
only to produce neoliberal ‘evil paradises’
(Davis and Monk, 2007). Still, given urban
resilience’s often-conservative, don’t-rock-
the-boat-too-much nature, geared towards
maintaining existing socioeconomic struc-
tures – and thus designs that sit comfortably
with politicians and developers of cities like
Miami Beach – perhaps there is something
compelling in the willingness to envision
scrapping one of the country’s most eco-
nomically unequal cities and building some-
thing different. For some, this is precisely
the transformative potential in the otherwise
negative Anthropocene: the possibility of
overturning existing regimes, shutting their
catastrophic methods down and experiment-
ing with other ways of living (Wakefield,
2020a). This raises difficult questions
answerable only by the people affected by
them. But could there be positive, demo-
cratic versions of Anthropocene urban dis-
assembly, waged not by technocrats or
developers upon helpless populations but by
populations against imposed urban regimes
or projects (on subaltern resistances to
urban climate projects, see Castán Broto
et al., 2020) or rotting, ‘zombie’ cities that
have themselves become hostile to human
931
life (Monnin, 2021)? Would this even be
desirable?
These are but some of the questions that
rethinking the resilient urban Anthropocene’s
inevitable dominance opens up. Exploring
them will create important new pathways of
engagement for critical urban theorists and
require new conceptual tools appropriate to a
world being drowned and set on fire.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of
interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This research was supported by an Urban Studies
Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
ORCID iD
Stephanie Wakefield https://orcid.org/0000-
0002-5070-8993
Notes
1. Chwa1czyk (2020) suggests ‘Urbanocene’.
2. One might ask, given its hurricane exposure
and, once bulldozed, lack of attractive bea-
ches, why rebuild in this location? The Miami
answer might be: why not? South Florida’s
current environment was built as real estate
speculation upon wetlands deemed uninhabi-
table by governments and planners. Miami
Beach’s beaches are themselves artificial. The
city is grounded on spectacular imaginaries
of subtropical life that attach people to the
region and that, retooled, could easily fuel
another round of libidinal-financial
investment.
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